Mr.Green had implicitly followed the directions in the letter the moment he received it--had allowed the "Amsterdam Cleansing Compound" to remain on the Rembrandt until eight o'clock in the evening--had called for the softest linen cloth in the whole house--and had then, with his own venerable hands, carefully wiped off the compound, and with it the whole surface of the picture! The brown, the black, the Burgomaster, the breakfast, and the ray of yellow light, all came clean off together in considerably less than a minute of time.

If the picture, was brought into court now, the evidence it could give against us was limited to a bit of plain panel, and a mass of black pulp rolled up in a duster.
Our line of defense was, of course, that the compound had been improperly used.

For the rest, we relied with well-placed confidence on the want of evidence against us.

Mr.Pickup wisely closed his shop for a while, and went off to the Continent to ransack the foreign galleries.
I received my five and twenty pounds, rubbed out the beginning of my second Rembrandt, closed the back door of the workshop behind me, and there was another scene of my life at an end.

I had but one circumstance to regret--and I did regret it bitterly.