Here the kindly jailor left the cell, and locking the door after him went straight to the authorities and laid the whole matter of the vision before them. As may be anticipated, the story was ridiculed. Some said that the jailor had been bribed by the prisoner to concoct such a narrative; others declared that the jailor must have been drunk, and having forgotten to lock the door of the cell some young female may have found admittance, and to cover his negligence he had trumped up this improbable story. They, however, took the trouble to visit the cell of the prisoner and to examine the writing on the wall, which they all declared themselves to be at a loss to guess with what material the prisoner himself could have written the name. The prisoner was questioned and cross-questioned, but was not found to contradict himself in anything. A piece of chalk was then put into the prisoner's hand and he was ordered to write the same name underneath that supposed to have been written by the spirit, but the handwriting was perfectly dissimilar. The jailor was then called, and had to do the same, but neither in this case did the writing at all resemble the burnt characters on the wall. Now, however mysterious this affair might have appeared to the authorities, yet to convict a gentleman of De Chevron's standing, or indeed any man upon such evidence as this, would be as absurd as it would be unfair; nevertheless, the story of the apparition in the prisoner's cell and of the writing on the wall spread like wildfire through the village, and had the effect of shaking the belief of many who had hitherto believed Archer guilty, and confirming more than ever in their previous belief those who still maintained him innocent. The general currency of this story, too, gave rise to inquiries as to the intimacy that had existed between John Archer and De Chevron. A certain amount of intimacy it was proved had existed between them, but so far the evidence was rather on De Chevron's side, as witnesses came forward to prove that De Chevron had always shown himself most friendly towards young Archer, and had occasionally made him some trifling present.