So to-night my task begins.

I am to prove that there is a conspiracy of crime so well organised, so widespread, so amazing in its daring, that the police of all the civilised countries are at present unable either to imagine or to defeat it—I am to do this or pay the supreme penalty of failure, ignominious and irrevocable.

I cannot tell you when first it was that some suspicion of the existence of this great republic of thieves and assassins first came to me. Years ago, I asked myself if it were not possible. There has been no great jewel robbery for a decade past which has not found me more zealous than the police themselves in study of its methods and judgment of its men. I can tell you the weight and size almost of every great jewel stolen, either in Europe or America, during the past five years. I know the life history of the men who are paying the penalty for some of those crimes. I can tell you whence they came and what was their intention should they have carried their booty away. I know the houses in London, in Paris, in Vienna, in Berlin where you may change a stolen diamond for money as readily as men cash a banknote across a counter. But there my knowledge has begun and ended. I feel like a child before a book whose print it cannot read. There is a great world of crime unexplored, and its very cities are unnamed. How, then, should a man begin his studies? I answer that he cannot begin them unless his destiny opens the book.

Let me set down my beliefs a little plainer. If ever the story be read, it will not be by those who have my grammar of crime at their call, or have studied, as I have studied, the gospel of robbery as long years expound it. It would be idle to maintain at great length my belief that the leading jewel robberies of the world are directed by one brain and organised by one supreme intelligence. If my own pursuit of this intelligence fail, the world will never read this narrative. If it succeed, the facts must be their own witnesses, speaking more eloquently than any thesis. Let me be content in this place to relate but a single circumstance. It is that of the discovery of a dead body just three years ago on the lonely seashore by the little fishing village of Palling, in Norfolk.

Now, witness this occurrence. The coastguard—for rarely does any but a coastguardsman tramp that lonely shore—a coastguard, patrolling his sandy beat at six o’clock of a spring morning, comes suddenly upon the body of a ship’s officer, lying stark upon the golden beach, cast there by the flood tide and left stranded by the ebb. No name upon the 

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