some evil spell. To handle the drums is to invite a minor accident.
Call it twaddle; probably is; and yet I have reason to believe that
there's something to the superstition."

Burlingame sniffed.

"I can prove it," Cutty declared. "I held those drums in my hands
one day. I carried them to a window the better to observe them.
On my return to the hotel I was knocked down by a horse and laid
up in bed for a week. That same night someone tried to kill the
man who showed me the emeralds. Coincidence? Perhaps. But these
days I'm shying at thirteen, the wrong side of the street, ladders,
and religious curses."

"An old hard-boiled egg like you?" Burlingame threw up his hands
in mock despair.

"I laugh, too; but I duck, nevertheless. The chap who showed me
the stones was what you'd call the honorary custodian; a privileged
character because of his genius. Before approaching him I sent him
a copy of my monograph on green stones. I found that he was quite
as crazy over green as I. That brought us together; and while I
drew him out I kept wondering where I had seen him before. Both his
name and his face were vaguely familiar. lt seems a superstition
had come along with the stones, from India to Persia, from there to
Russia. A maid fortunate enough to see the drums would marry and
be happy. The old fellow confessed that occasionally he secretly
admitted a peasant maid to gaze upon the stones. But he never let
the male inmates of the palace find this out. He knew them a little
too intimately. A bad lot."