It might have been twenty minutes later that there fell upon my startled
ear a sound which under the circumstances was distinctly sinister--that
of a man's foot on the sanded floor of the kitchen passage below. A timid
child at all times, there is no need to say that when I crept to the head
of the stairs, and, after listening there breathlessly for a few seconds,
ascertained beyond doubt that more than one man was moving about in the
rooms below me, I was filled with almost a paralysing sense of terror.
Here at last the "robbers" of whom I and my brother had so often talked
in frightened whispers in our beds, were come in good earnest. What was
to be done? And then there flashed upon me, like an inspiration, the
recollection of a plan which we had talked over together when discussing
the best means of driving the robbers from our house, should they ever
enter it. We had both agreed, then, that if we could but induce any
ordinary thief to believe that a certain big relative of ours, whose
colossal proportions we had often admired, was on the premises, there
would be no need to do anything else to make the intruder flee
affrighted. My mind was made up. Creeping softly back into the parlour, I
seized the tongs. These I hurled suddenly down the kitchen stairs, and
when the terrible din thus raised had died out, I cried in my childish
treble, "Uncle John! Uncle John! Come downstairs! There are thieves in
the house!" There was a cry of rage or alarm from the kitchen, a hurried
scuffling of feet on the floor, and then through a window I saw my two
friends the pedlars flying through the yard, and pausing not to look
behind. I ought, of course, to have forthwith gone downstairs and done my
duty by that back door, which I had so shamefully neglected earlier in
the day; but I am ashamed to say that my momentary access of courage had
entirely died away by this time, and that for no imaginable sum of money
would I have dared to descend those stairs, and pass through the dark
passage leading to the back door. The thieves were in due time captured
and transported for another offence; but my parents refused to prosecute