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Mr. Adams scratched his head.

“What I’d like to know,” said he after a while, “is how to get the cask up them steps.”

“There’ll be a cellar-door for sartin,” Mr. Jope assured him cheerfully. “You don’t suppose the gentry takes their beer in at the front, hey?”

“This,” said Mr. Adams, “is rum; which is a totally different thing.” But he set down his barrow, albeit reluctantly, and followed his shipmate up the entrance steps. The front door was massive, and sheeted over with lead embossed in foliate and heraldic patterns. Mr. Jope inserted the key, turned it with some difficulty, and pushed the door wide. It opened immediately upon the great hall, and after a glance within he removed his hat.

The hall, some fifty feet long, ran right across the waist of the house, and was lit by tall windows at either end. Its floor was of black and white marble in lozenge pattern. Three immense chandeliers depended from its roof. Along each of the two unpierced walls, against panels of peeling stucco, stood a line of statuary–heathen goddesses, fauns, athletes and gladiators, with here and there a vase or urn copied from the antique. The furniture consisted of half a dozen chairs, a settee, and an octagon table, all carved out of wood in pseudo-classical patterns, and painted with a grey wash to resemble stone.

“It’s a fine room,” said Mr. Jope, walking up to a statue of Diana: “but a man couldn’ hardly invite a mixed company to dinner here.”

“Symonds’s f’r instance,” suggested Mr. Adams. Symonds’s being a somewhat notorious boarding-house in a street of Plymouth which shall be nameless.

“You ought to be ashamed o’ yourself, Bill,” said Mr. Jope sternly.

“They’re anticks, that’s what they are.”

Mr. Adams drew a long breath.

“I shouldn’ wonder,” he said.

“Turnin’ ’em wi’ their faces to the wall ‘d look too marked,” mused Mr. Jope. “But a few tex o’ Scripture along the walls might ease things down a bit.”

“Wot about the hold?” Mr. Adams suggested.

“The cellar, you mean. Let’s have a look.”

They passed through the hall; thence down a stone stairway into an ample vaulted kitchen, and thence along a slate-flagged corridor flanked by sculleries, larders and other kitchen offices. The two seamen searched the floors of all in hope of finding a cellar trap or hatchway, and Mr. Adams was still searching when Mr. Jope called to him from the end of the corridor:

“Here we are!”

He had found a flight of steps worthy of a cathedral crypt, leading down to a stone archway. The archway was closed by an iron-studded door.

“It’s like goin’ to church,” commented Mr. Jope, bating his voice. “Where’s the candles, Bill?”

“In the barrer ‘long wi’ the bread an’ bacon.”

“Then step back and fetch ’em.”

But from the foot of the stairs Mr. Jope presently called up that this was unnecessary, for the door had opened to his hand–smoothly, too, and without noise; but he failed to note this as strange, being taken aback for the moment by a strong draught of air that met him, blowing full in his face.

“There’s daylight here, too, of a sort,” he reported: and so there was. It pierced the darkness in a long shaft, slanting across from a doorway of which the upper panel stood open to the sky.

“Funny way o’ leavin’ a house,” he muttered, as he stepped across the bare cellar floor and peered forth. “Why, hallo, here’s water!”

The cellar, in fact, stood close by the river’s edge, with a broad postern-sill actually overhanging the tide, and a flight of steps, scarcely less broad, curving up and around the south-west angle of the house.

While Mr. Jope studied these and the tranquil river flowing, all grey and twilit, at his feet, Mr. Adams had joined him and had also taken bearings.

“With a check-rope,” said Mr. Adams, “–and I got one in the barrer– we can lower it down here easy.”