Violent language! but one may hear harangues very like it any day within Hyde Park, by the Marble Arch. There are many incendiaries in the making around us to-day, and as little attention is paid to them as to Martin’s ravings. Undoubtedly mad, he possessed something of the madman’s cunning, and with the plan of firing the Cathedral fully formed, set out with his wife for Leeds, as he gave out, on the 27th of January. At Leeds he remained a few days, and was remarkable for his unusually quiet and orderly behaviour. He left on Saturday morning, ostensibly for Tadcaster, saying he should return on the Monday; but went instead to York. Here the madman’s cunning broke down, for he stayed at a place where he was well known; at the lodgings, in fact, that he had left a few days before. He prowled about the Cathedral the whole of the next day, Sunday, and attended service there, hiding behind a tomb in the north transept; overheard the notes of the organ—the finest in England—thundering and booming and rolling in echoes amid the fretted roofs. The sound troubled the brain of the maniac. “Buzz, buzz,” he whispered; “I’ll teach thee to stop thy buzzing,” and hid, shivering with religious and lunatic ecstasy, in the recess until the building was empty. [Picture: Jonathan Martin, Incendiary] The short February day closed, and left the Cathedral in darkness; but he still waited. The ringers paid their evening-visit to the belfry, and he watched them from his hiding-place. He watched them go and then began his work. The ringers had left the belfry unlocked. Ascending to it, he cut a length of about a hundred feet off the prayer-bell rope, and, with his sailor’s handiness, made a rough ladder of it, by which to escape. Those were the days before lucifer matches. He had come provided with a razor, which he used as a steel; a flint, tinder, and a penny candle cut in two. Climbing, then, into the choir, he made two piles on the floor of prayer-books, curtains, hassocks, and cushions, and taking a candle from the altar, cut it up and distributed it between the two. Then, setting light to them, he set to work to escape. He had taken a pair of pincers from the shoemaker with whom he lodged, and breaking with them a window in the north transept, he hauled his rope through, and descended into the Minster Yard, soon after three o’clock in the morning.