ut it. The most curious
thing about it is that it was not discovered by me; it was discovered
by my friend Basil Grant, a star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely
stirred out of his attic.

Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least
unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he
would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because,
like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he
might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt
the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the
sunset clouds. He lived in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs
of Lambeth. He was surrounded by a chaos of things that were in
odd contrast to the slums around him; old fantastic books, swords,
armour--the whole dust-hole of romanticism. But his face, amid all these
quixotic relics, appeared curiously keen and modern--a powerful, legal
face. And no one but I knew who he was.

Long ago as it is, everyone remembers the terrible and grotesque scene
that occurred in--, when one of the most acute and forcible of the
English judges suddenly went mad on the bench. I had my own view of that
occurrence; but about the facts themselves there is no question at all.
For some months, indeed for some years, people had detected something
curious in the judge's conduct. He seemed to have lost interest in the
law, in which he had been beyond expression brilliant and terrible as
a K.C., and to be occupied in giving personal and moral advice to the
people concerned. He talked more like a priest or a doctor, and a very
outspoken one at that. The first thrill was probably given when he said
to a man who had attempted a crime of passion: "I sentence you to
three years imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and God-given
conviction, that what you require is three months at the seaside." He
accused criminals from the bench, not so much of their obvious legal
crimes, but of things that had never been heard of in a court of
justice, monstrous egoism, lack of humour, and morbidity deliberately
encouraged. Things came to a head in that celebrated diamond case in
which the Prime Minister himself, that brilliant patrician, had to come
forward, gracefully and reluctantly, to give evidence against his valet.
After the detailed life of the household had been thoroughly exhibited,
the judge requested the Premier again to step fo