There was another book which I read to myself and liked, if anything, still better. I found it in Everard’s bedroom. It was a yellow-backed novel, and it had on the cover the picture of a dwarf letting off a pistol. It was called the _Siege of Castle Something_ and it was by—that is the question, who was it by? I would give anything to know. The name of the author seemed to me at the time quite familiar, that is to say, a name one had heard people talk about, like Trollope or Whyte-Melville. The story was that of an impecunious family who led a gay life in London at a suburban house called the Robber’s Cave, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were always in debt, and finally, to escape bailiffs, they shut themselves up in a castle on the seacoast, where they were safe unless a bailiff should succeed in entering the house, and present the writ to one of the debtors in person. The bailiffs tried every expedient to force a way into the castle, one of them dressing up as an old dowager who was a friend of the family, and driving up to the castle in a custard-coloured carriage. But the inmates of the house were wily, and they had a mechanical device by which coloured billiard balls appeared on the frieze of the drawing-room and warned them when a bailiff was in the offing.
One day when they had a visitor to tea, a billiard ball suddenly made a clicking noise round the frieze. “What is that for?” asked the interested guest. “That,” said the host, with great presence of mind, “is a signal that a ship is in sight.” As tea went on, a perfect plethora of billiard balls of different colours appeared in the frieze. “There must be a great many ships in sight to-day,” said the guest. “A great many,” answered the host.
Whether a bailiff ever got into the house I don’t know. The picture on the cover seems to indicate that he did. The book was in Everard’s cupboard for years, and then, “suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.” I never have been able to find it again, although I have never stopped looking for it. Once I thought I had run it to earth. I once met at the Vice-Provost’s house at Eton a man who was an expert lion-hunter and who seemed to have read every English novel that had ever been published. I described him the book. He had read it. He remembered the picture on the cover and the story, but, alas! he could recall neither its name nor that of the author.