Harry Escombe

HOW THE ADVENTURE ORIGINATED. The hour was noon, the month chill October; and the occupants—a round dozen in number—of Sir Philip Swinburne’s drawing office were more or less busily pursuing their vocation of preparing drawings and tracings, taking out quantities, preparing estimates, and, in short, executing the several duties of a civil engineers’ draughtsman as well as they could in a temperature of 35° Fahrenheit, and in an atmosphere surcharged with smoke from a flue that refused to draw—when the door communicating with the chief draughtsman’s room opened and the head of Mr Richards, the occupant of that apartment, protruded through the aperture. At the sound of the opening door the draughtsmen, who were acquainted with Mr Richards’s ways, glanced up with one accord from their work, and the eye of one of them was promptly caught by Mr Richards, who, raising a beckoning finger, remarked: “Escombe, I want you,” and immediately retired. “Sit down, Escombe,” remarked the dreaded potentate as he pointed to a chair. Escombe seated himself; and then ensued a silence of a full minute’s duration. The potentate seemed to be meditating how to begin. At length