athletic humour; how he turned the juge d'instruction upside down
and stood him on his head, "to clear his mind"; how he ran down
the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman under each arm. It is due to
him to say that his fantastic physical strength was generally
employed in such bloodless though undignified scenes; his real
crimes were chiefly those of ingenious and wholesale robbery. But
each of his thefts was almost a new sin, and would make a story by
itself. It was he who ran the great Tyrolean Dairy Company in
London, with no dairies, no cows, no carts, no milk, but with some
thousand subscribers. These he served by the simple operation of
moving the little milk cans outside people's doors to the doors of
his own customers. It was he who had kept up an unaccountable and
close correspondence with a young lady whose whole letter-bag was
intercepted, by the extraordinary trick of photographing his
messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope. A
sweeping simplicity, however, marked many of his experiments. It
is said that he once repainted all the numbers in a street in the
dead of night merely to divert one traveller into a trap. It is
quite certain that he invented a portable pillar-box, which he put
up at corners in quiet suburbs on the chance of strangers dropping
postal orders into it. Lastly, he was known to be a startling
acrobat; despite his huge figure, he could leap like a grasshopper
and melt into the tree-tops like a monkey. Hence the great
Valentin, when he set out to find Flambeau, was perfectly aware
that his adventures would not end when he had found him.

But how was he to find him? On this the great Valentin's
ideas were still in process of settlement.

There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of