this time the ex-engine-driver received four months. As before, he
offered no defence: and again the magistrates were possessed with
wonder.


Now the explanation is quite simple. This man's wits were sound,
save on one point. He believed--why, God alone knows, who enabled
him to drive that horrible journey without a tremor of the hand--that
his wife's soul haunted him in the form of a white butterfly or moth.
The superstition that spirits take this shape is not unknown in the
West; and I suppose that as he steered his train out of the station,
this fancy, by some odd freak of memory, leaped into his brain, and
held it, hour after hour, while he and his engine flew forward and
the burning theatre fell further and further behind. The truth was
known a fortnight after his return from prison, which happened about
the time of barley harvest.

A harvest-thanksgiving was held in the parish where he lived; and he
went to it, being always a religious man. There were sheaves and
baskets of vegetables in the chancel; fruit and flowers on the
communion-table, with twenty-one tall candles burning above them; a
processional hymn; and a long sermon. During the sermon, as the
weather was hot and close, someone opened the door at the west end.

And when the preacher was just making up his mind to close the
discourse, a large white moth fluttered in at the west door.

There was much light throughout the church; but the great blaze came,
of course, from the twenty-one candles upon the altar. And towards
this the moth slowly drifted, as if the candles sucked her nearer and