"Didn't believe what? Who's Scroggins?"

"Scroggins! Oh, why he was the other man, you know--it was wife."

"WHAT was his wife--what's SHE got to do with it?"

"Why, that's what I'm telling you. It was she that found the hat.
She'd come up with her cousin to London--her cousin was my sister-
in-law, and the other niece had married a man named Evans, and
Evans, after it was all over, had taken the box round to Mr.
Jacobs', because Jacobs' father had seen the man, when he was
alive, and when he was dead, Joseph--"

"Now look here, never you mind Evans and the box; what's become of
your uncle and the gun?"

"The gun! What gun?"

"Why, the gun that your uncle used to keep in the garden, and that
wasn't there. What did he do with it? Did he kill any of these
people with it--these Jacobses and Evanses and Scrogginses and
Josephses? Because, if so, it was a good and useful work, and we
should enjoy hearing about it."

"No--oh no--how could he?--he had been built up alive in the wall,
you know, and when Edward IV spoke to the abbot about it, my sister
said that in her then state of health she could not and would not,
as it was endangering the child's life. So they christened it
Horatio, after her own son, who had been killed at Waterloo before