The fire was supposed to be purely accidental; the insurance companies, usually cautious enough, had paid over their varying amounts of insurance to those fortunate losers, who were not, like Mr. Burton, unprepared. These losers were men of wealth, and the highest position as business firms--high and mighty potentates, against whom to breathe a breath of slander, was to overwhelm the audacious individual in the ruins of his own presumption. Mr. Burton had an inward conviction that these men were guilty of arson. He knew it. His mind perceived their guilt. But he could make no allegation against them upon such unsubstantial basis as this. He went to work, quietly and singly, to gather up the threads in the cable of his proof; and when he had made it strong enough to hang them twice over--for two lives, that of a porter and a clerk, had been lost in the burning buildings--he threatened them with exposure, unless they made good to him the loss which he had sustained through their villainy. They laughed at him from their stronghold of respectability. He brought the case into court. Alas! for the pure, white statue of Justice which beautifies the desecrated chambers of the law. Banded together, with inexhaustible means of corruption at their command, the guilty were triumphant. During this experience, Mr. Burton had got an inside view of life, in the marts, on exchange, in the halls of justice, and in the high and low places where men do congregate. It was as if, with the thread in his hand, which he had picked out, he unraveled the whole web of human iniquity. Burning with a sense of his individual wrongs, he could not look calmly on and see others similarly exposed; he grew fascinated with his labor of dragging the dangerous secrets of a community to the light. The more he called into play the peculiar faculties of his mind, which made him so successful a hunter on the paths of the guilty, the more marvelous became their development. He was like an Indian on the trail of his enemy--the bent grass, the broken twig, the evanescent dew--which, to the uninitiated, were "trifles light as air," to him were "proofs strong as Holy Writ." In this work he was actuated by no pernicious motives. Upright and humane, with a generous heart which pitied the innocent injured, his conscience would allow him no rest if he permitted crime, which he could see walking where others could not, to flourish unmolested in the sunshine made for better uses. He attached himself to the secret detective-police; only working up such cases as demanded the benefit of his rare powers. Thus much of Mr. Burton had the chief of police revealed to me, during a brief interview in the morning; and this information, it may be supposed, had not lessened the fascinations which he had for me. The first thing he said, after the greetings of the day, when he came to my room, was,