been bleeding internally from the loss of his pound of flesh; at any rate
there was bloodshed in his eyes.

I stood a long time outside that hatter's window, and finally went in to
choose a cap. But the light is wicked in those narrow shops, and this
necessitated my carrying several caps to the broad daylight of the
threshold to gauge their shades, and incidentally to achieve a swift
survey of the street. Then they crowned me with an ingenious apparatus
like a typewriter, to get the exact shape and measure of my skull, for I
had intimated that I had no desire to dress it anywhere else for the
future. All this must have taken up the most of twenty minutes, yet after
getting as far as Mr. Shylock's I remembered that I required what one's
hatter (and no one else) calls a "boater," and back I went to order one
in addition to the cap. And as the next tack fetches the buoy, so my next
perambulation (in which, however, I was thinking seriously of a new
bowler) brought me face to face with Raffles once more.

We shouted and shook hands; our encounter had taken place almost under
the money-lender's windows, and it was so un-English in its cordiality
that between our slaps and grasps Raffles managed deftly to insert a
stout packet in my breast pocket. I cannot think the most critical
pedestrian could have seen it done. But streets have as many eyes as
Argus, and some of them are always on one.

"They had to send to the bank for it," whispered Raffles. "It barely
passed through their hands. But don't you let Shylock spot his own
envelope!"

In another second he was saying something very different that anybody
might have heard, and in yet another he was hustling me across Shylock's