mes.

"What on earth is the poor dear doing now?" she thought. "This is
really the limit!" And slipping on her slippers and blue dressing-gown
she ensconced herself behind the curtain to await developments.

Mr. Lavender had now backed away from the flames at which he had been
blowing, and remained on his hands and knees, apparently assuring himself
that they had really obtained hold. He then rose, and to her intense
surprise began climbing up on to the pile. She watched him at first with
an amused astonishment, so ludicrous was his light little figure, crowned
by stivered-up white hair, and the expression of eager melancholy on his
thin, high-cheekboned face upturned towards her window. Then, to her
dismay, she saw that the flame had really caught, and, suddenly persuaded
that he had some crazy intention of injuring himself with the view,
perhaps, of attracting her attention, she ran out of her room and down
the stairs, and emerging from the back door just as she was, circled her
garden, so that she might enter Mr. Lavender's garden from behind him,
ready for any eventuality. She arrived within arm's reach of him without
his having heard her, for Blink, whose anxious face as she watched her
master wasting, could be discerned at the bedroom-window, was whining,
and Mr. Lavender himself had now broken into a strange and lamentable
chantey, which, in combination with the creeping flutter of the flames in
the weekly journals encircling the base of the funeral pyre, well-nigh
made her blood curdle.

"Aurora," sang Mr. Lavender, in that most dolorous voice,

"Aurora, my heart I bring,
For I know well it will not burn,
Oh! when the leaves puff out in Spring
And when the leaves in Autumn turn
Think, think of me!
Aurora, I pass away!
Upon my horse of air I ride;
Here let my grizzled ashes stay,
But take, ah! take my heart inside!
Aurora! Aurora!"

At this moment, just as a fit of the most uncontrollable laughter was
about to seize her, she saw a flame which had just consumed the word
Horatio reach Mr. Lavender's right calf.

"Oh!" he cried out in desperate tones, stretching up his arms to the sky.
"Now is my hour come! Sweet-sky, open and let me see her face! Behold!
behold her with the eyes of faith. It is enough. Courage, brother; let
me now consume in silence!" So saying, he folded his arm tightly across
his breast and closed his lips. The flame rising to the