First Period First Narrative - Chapter VI

"What did your father do, sir?" I asked.

"Do?" says Mr. Franklin. "I'll tell you what he did. He brought the
invaluable faculty, called common sense, to bear on the Colonel's
letter. The whole thing, he declared, was simply absurd. Somewhere in
his Indian wanderings, the Colonel had picked up with some wretched
crystal which he took for a diamond. As for the danger of his being
murdered, and the precautions devised to preserve his life and his piece
of crystal, this was the nineteenth century, and any man in his senses
had only to apply to the police. The Colonel had been a notorious
opium-eater for years past; and, if the only way of getting at the
valuable papers he possessed was by accepting a matter of opium as
a matter of fact, my father was quite willing to take the ridiculous
responsibility imposed on him--all the more readily that it involved no
trouble to himself. The Diamond and the sealed instructions went into
his banker's strong-room, and the Colonel's letters, periodically
reporting him a living man, were received and opened by our family
lawyer, Mr. Bruff, as my father's representative. No sensible person,
in a similar position, could have viewed the matter in any other way.
Nothing in this world, Betteredge, is probable unless it appeals to our
own trumpery experience; and we only believe in a romance when we see it
in a newspaper."

It was plain to me from this, that Mr. Franklin thought his father's
notion about the Colonel hasty and wrong.