At the end of this time a little local excitement was stirred by the return of the criminal, out on ticket-of-leave, and presenting all the appearance of a degraded, battered and senile old man. His one-time partner--a town councilor by then--resented his intrusion exceedingly; but finding him to be impervious, apparently, to the sting of memory, and presumably harmless to sting any more on his own account, he bestirred himself to quarter the driveling wreck on an almshouse--a proceeding which gained him much approval on the part of all but those who retained recollection of the origin of the quarrel. In this happy asylum the poor ruin breathed his last within a month of its admission, and the rubbish of it was buried--not in the pauper corner of some city cemetery, as one might suppose, but in the very yard of the cathedral itself. For, curiously enough, the fading creature before his death had claimed lying-room in a family vault sunk in that august inclosure, and his claim was found to be a legitimate one. I knew the place where he lay, well; for an end of the old vault they had opened for his accommodation tunneled under a pathway that cut the yard obliquely, and, passing along it one’s feet hit out the spot in a low reverberating thud of two steps that spoke of hollowness beneath the gravel. The July of the present year I write of being the fourth from that poor thing’s death and burial, was marked by one of the most terrific thunderstorms that have ever in my memory visited Winton. If there was one man abroad in those bitter hours, there was one only, I should say, and he paid a grewsome price for his temerity. He was returning home from a birthday party, was that fated councilor, and, fired with a Dutch courage, must have taken that very path across the yard under which his once partner lay, and which he generally for some good reason rather avoided. What followed he might never describe himself, for that was the last of him. But a strange and eerie scene met the sight of an early riser abroad in the yard the next morning. It appeared that a bolt had struck and wrenched a huge limb from one of the great lime trees skirting the path; that the heavy butt of this, clapping down upon that spot of the gravel under which the end of the vault lay, had splintered the massive lid stone into half a dozen pieces, so that they collapsed and fell inward, crashing upon and breaking open in their fall the pauper’s coffin underneath. “Whom God seeks to destroy, He first maddens.” Into this awful trap, in the rain and storm and darkness, Mr. Councilor walked plump, and there he was found in the morning, dead and ghastly, his already once-wounded leg caught in a crevice made by the broken stone and wood--his heel actually resting in the bony hand of his enemy who had waited for him so long. All that by the way. It was a grim enough story by itself, no doubt, but I mention it only here as bearing indirectly upon a little matter of my own.