was no room for malice; not even for illwill, so far as I have been able to learn, and I made strict inquiry on that point. How did those deeds get back into my safe! Who brought them back? They were brought back after an absence of nearly six months and by human means. This circumstance in the life of a lawyer but serves to show the great difficulty that exists in producing satisfactory evidence in classes of cases like the one I have de scribed. Am I mistaken in my remembrance of facts, or is my partner? It must be so; but we prove by competent witnesses that our statement must be accepted by every rule of settled evidence. I know the deeds were in my safe. I had spent days in reading and becoming familiar with their contents and in making an index of them. I made a particular place for them in the safe, and no other papers were mixed with them. I gave them out with my own hands, and their place of deposit remained empty for months, causing me chagrin every day. After a long time they reappear and in the same spot from which I took them. They were damp when I observed them first on their return. They had been in the safe only a short time, because on the eve ning preceding the morning I found them they were not in the safe. Their dampness was the only clew I had, and that lead only to a field of conjecture so wide that I knew not what step to take. My safe was perfectly dry, and papers that lay in it for years show no appearance of
moisture. My office was locked and I opened it with the usual key. There was no sign of its being tampered with and no trace of anyone having entered it before myself on that morning. The dampness of the papers was a cir cumstance also that went to show that some other person than my partner replaced the bundle. Why should he expose them to the weather? He knew their importance, and he, equally with myself, was interested in their preservation. Our relations were such that had he failed to deliver them, or had he misplaced them, he would not have hesitated to make it known at once. Neither one of us had spoken of the matter, because we did not care to advertise our seeming negligence, and we thought that the papers would be found at the club upon a careful search. No one, to our knowledge, was frightened into returning the papers by the fear of a prosecution, for we had no reason to fix a suspicion upon any person and we had not spoken of the matter to others. Why should they have been returned in a manner apparently clandestine? No damage actually resulted, and that fact, perhaps, should satisfy one. But it would gratify me to have the matter cleared of the mystery that enshrouds, it; and I make this narrative in the hope that some lawyer, from a similar experience in his own case, or in the practice of another which has come to his knowledge, may take up the clew, if there be one, and follow it out to a demonstration.
