An enormous fellow,
with a great red face and cropped moustache, occupied my poor
father's place; he it was who had replaced our fruitful vineries
with his stinking stables; but I am bound to own he looked a genial
clod, as he sat in his fat and listened to the young bloods boasting
of their prowess, or elaborately explaining their mishaps. And for
a minute we listened also, before I remembered my responsibilities,
and led Raffles round to the back of the house.
There never was an easier house to enter. I used to feel that
keenly as a boy, when, by a prophetic irony, burglars were my
bugbear, and I looked under my bed every night in life. The
bow-windows on the ground floor finished in inane balconies to the
first-floor windows. These balconies had ornamental iron railings,
to which a less ingenious rope-ladder than ours could have been
hitched with equal ease. Raffles had brought it with him, round
his waist, and he carried the telescopic stick for fixing it in
place. The one was unwound, and the other put together, in a
secluded corner of the red-brick walls, where of old I had played
my own game of squash-rackets in the holidays.
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