The place was cold as the inviolate vault; blinds
had to be drawn up, and glass cases uncovered, before we could see
a thing except the row of murderers' death-masks - the placid
faces with the swollen necks - that stood out on their shelves to
give us ghostly greeting.
"This fellow isn't formidable," whispered Raffles, as the blinds
went up; "still, we can't be too careful. My little lot are round
the corner, in the sort of recess; don't look till we come to them
in their turn."
So we began at the beginning, with the glass case nearest the door;
and in a moment I discovered that I knew far more about its contents
than our pallid guide. He had some enthusiasm, but the most
inaccurate smattering of his subject. He mixed up the first murderer
with quite the wrong murder, and capped his mistake in the next
breath with an intolerable libel on the very pearl of our particular
tribe.
"This revawlver," he began, "belonged to the celebrited burgular,
Chawles Peace. These are his spectacles, that's his jimmy, and this
here knife's the one that Chawley killed the policeman with.
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