A Detective’s Experience
A Prison Scene
The long shadows that follow the sun’s decline were nestling on the grass and playing among the rose bushes of a pleasant lawn on Prytania street, from which an English cottage rose like a bower of beauty. The white marble walls gleamed through verdant leaves like ivory, and the song of birds made the air vocal with melody. Within the bower reigned a quiet oppression in its silence. The wide windows admitted the evening breeze, which rustled the papers on the table and lifted the stray, thin locks of an old man asleep on the lounge. A sob would sometimes shake his bosom, and his lips muttered as if in prayer—and anon a spasm of pain would cross his face, as a sense of his sorrow weighed on his mind. “I stood in the door,” said Mr. F——, “watching that troubled sleep, reluctant to break it, for I had that to tell which must augment his grief.”
There is, however, a [subtle] sense, which tells of a stranger’s presence even in sleep. Under this influence the old man woke. He was prepared for my coming and asked me eagerly:
“Have you any trace, sir—have you any trace?”