Now for the denouement of the riddle. In the year 1874 there actually came into the market, at a sale of the Duke of Brunswick's jewels at Geneva, a triangular blue dia­mond weighing between twelve and thirteen carats; and subsequently elsewhere a very much smaller piece again of the same colour and quality. Since all these stones were of the same rare blue tint which has never been encoun­tered in any other diamond known in the world, and since their total weight—allowing for cleavage and cutting—is a rough equivalent of the royal French jewel, no doubt can exist in the mind of any logical person that the thief, who­ever it was, had the original stone cut into three pieces as conditioned by its natural cleavage lines. Much has been written about the Hope diamond, mainly with intent to stress the fact that it has brought bad luck to all its successive owners. But I do not wish to enlarge upon that aspect. I remember seeing a telegram forty-two years ago addressed to my principal in Paris advising him that his father (my uncle) had purchased the Hope dia­mond at Christie's sale-rooms and that he had already re­ceived an offer for it from a New York firm of diamond merchants. It is true that my uncle died at a comparatively