“ ‘You have a very handsome stick,’ I answered. ‘By the inscription I observed that you had not had it more than a year. But you have taken some pains to bore the head of it and pour melted lead into the hole so as to make it a formidable weapon. I argued that you would not take such precautions unless you had some danger to fear.’
“ ‘Anything else?’ he asked, smiling.
“ ‘You have boxed a good deal in your youth.’
“ ‘Right again. How did you know it? Is my nose knocked a little out of the straight?’
“ ‘No,’ said I. ‘It is your ears. They have the peculiar flattening and thickening which marks the boxing man.’
“ ‘Anything else?’
“ ‘You have done a good deal of digging by your callosities.’
“ ‘Made all my money at the gold fields.’
“ ‘You have been in New Zealand.’
“ ‘Right again.’
“ ‘You have visited Japan.’
“ ‘Quite true.’
“ ‘And you have been most intimately associated with someone whose initials were J. A. , and whom you afterwards were eager to entirely forget.’
“ Mr. Trevor stood slowly up, fixed his large blue eyes upon me with a strange wild stare, and then pitched forward, with his face among the nutshells which strewed the cloth, in a dead faint.