this frame of pure silver-work, burning
without noise and with scarcely any smoke--this by reason of the
excessive dryness of the woodwork--the church stood one glowing vault
of fire. There was indeed so little smoke that at the first alarm,
looking from my bedroom window, I had been incredulous; and still I
wondered rather than believed, staring into this furnace wherein
every pillar, nook, seat or text on the wall was distinctly visible,
the south windows being burnt out and the great door thrown open and
on fire.

"There was no entrance possible here, or indeed anywhere: but, being
half-distraught, I ran around to the small door of the north aisle.
This, too, was on fire--or, rather, was already consumed; and you
will say that I must have been wholly distraught when I tell you what
I saw, looking in through the aperture through which it would have
been death to pass. I saw _him_."

"You saw the young man Luke?" I asked, as he paused, inviting a word.

"He was standing by the stone figures within the porch. . . . And
they crumbled--crumbled before my eyes in the awful heat. But he
stood scatheless. He was young and comely; the hair of his head was
not singed. He was as one of the three that walked in the midst of
Nebuchadnezzar's furnace. . . . When the stone slab was crumbled to a
handful of dust, he moved up the aisle and was gone. . . . That is
all: but, as you accept your friend for a truthful man, explain, O
sceptic!"

--And again there fell a silence in the garden.

FIAT JUSTITIA RUAT SOLUM.

In the days of my childhood, and up to the year 1886, the Justices of
the Peace for the Gantick Division of Hundred of Powder, in the
county of Cornwall, held their Petty Sessions at Scawns, a bleak,
foursquare building set on the knap of a windy hill, close beside the
high road that leads up from the sea to the market town of
Tregarrick. The house, when the county in Quarter Sessions purchased
it to convert it into a police station and petty sessional court, had
been derelict for twenty years--that is to say, ever since the winter
of 1827, when Squire Nicholas, the last owner to reside in it
(himself an ornament in his time of the Gantick Bench), broke his
neck in the hunting field. With his death, the property passed to
some distant cousin in the North, who seldom visited Cornwall.
This cousin leased the Scawns acres to a farmer alongside of whose
fields they marched, and the farmer, having no use for