was reflected through. But plump in the middle of
the staircase my father encountered a man. It was Mad Jeremy going out
serenely enough, carrying the candle in one hand, and his precious
melodeon in the other. He saw my father. My father saw him. With one
intent to fight and slay they rushed at each other--Jeremy's wild
screech mingling with my father's roar as of a charging bull.

Neither got home. My father's iron bar would doubtless have broken the
madman's skull, but that, with his usual agility, he leaped to the
side. Jeremy smashed the heavy candle over my father's head, and fled
upstairs, not because he was afraid for himself, but in order to
protect the melodeon from the blow he saw coming.

"Ye shall na get it," he shouted. "It's nane o' yours. I paid good
money for it ower the counter o' your ain shop!"

And he fled upward through the flames, which seemed to wrap him round
without doing any harm. They seemed his element.

* * * * *

As I say, Mr. Ablethorpe and I came just too late. We had seen from
afar the burning house--at least, we had seen the "skarrow" in the
sky--the Grange itself lying (as all the world knows) at the very
bottom of Deep Moat Hollow, with the pond on one side and the woods all
about.

But once on our way, we had made haste, as indeed had many another.
However, we started earlier than the others, though my father, living
as it were next door, was far before any of us. Indeed, had it not
been for him---- Well, I will go on with my tale.

We rushed across the drawbridge, which, just as he had done, we found
down. We followed him across the lily plots. Right in the middle Mr.
Ablethorpe came a cropper. I was on the look-out. It was not the
first time that I had played at hide-and-seek there in difficult
circumstances, though never with the windows above crackling and the
flames licking the ivy and dry Virginia creeper off the walls, and the
smoke so thick that the landscape was almost blotted out by it.

I arrived, a little in front of the Hayfork Parson, on the threshold of
the door of Deep Moat Grange. And that is why I was the first to
welcome a pair of Lazaruses risen from the dead--one, a girl,
apparently truly dead, held in the arms of the wildest and most savage
man I had ever beheld, upon whose shoulder her head reclined, and in
whose menacing right hand was a rough bar of iron, pointed like a
chisel.

I think he did not see w