what I am going to relate of my own experience. . . . The old church,
as you know, was destroyed by fire in the morning hours of Christmas
Day, 1870. Throughout Christmas Eve and for a great part of the
night it had been snowing, but the day broke brilliantly, on a sky
without wind or cloud; and never have my eyes seen anything so
terribly beautiful--ay, so sublime--as the sight which met them at
the lych-gate. The old spire--which served as a sea-mark for the
fishermen, and was kept regularly white-washed that it might be the
more conspicuous--glittered in the morning sunshine from base to
summit, as though matching its whiteness against that of the
snow-laden elms: and in 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