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 the mansion,
gladly sub-let it. The county authorities, having acquired the