Good evening. Welcome to the Just Sleep podcast. I'm Tasia, your host.

Every week, I will read you an old story to help you relax of the stressful day behind you and drift off to sleep.

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Tonight, I will be reading another story from the amateur cracksman by E.W. Hornung.

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So lie down, close your eyes, and let me read you a story.

That night he told me the story of his earliest crime. Not since the fateful morning of the

Iads of March, when he had just mentioned it as an unreported incident of a certain

cricket tour, had I succeeded in getting a word out of raffles on the subject. It was not for want

of trying. He would shake his head and watch his cigarettes smoke thoughtfully, a subtle look in his

eyes, half cynical, half wistful, as though the

decent, honest days that were no more, had had their merits after all. Raffles would plan

a fresh enormity or glory in the last, with the unmitigated enthusiasm of the artist.

It was impossible to imagine one throb or Twitter of compunction

beneath those frankly egotistic and infectious transports. And yet the ghost of a dead

remorse seemed still to visit him with the memory of his first felony, so that I had given the

story up long before the night of our return for

Milchester. Cricket, however, was in the air, and Raffles Cricket bag, back where he

sometimes kept it in the fender, with the remains of a label still adhering to the leather.

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