an manfully to blow the flames....

Now the young lady in the adjoining castle, who had got out of bed,
happened, as she sometimes did, to go to the window for a look at the
sun rising over Parliament Hill. Attracted by the smell of burning paper
she saw Mr. Lavender in this act of blowing up the flames.

"What on earth is the poor dear doing now?" she thought. "This is really
the limit!" And slipping on her slippers and blue dressing-gown she
ensconced herself behind the curtain to await developments.

Mr. Lavender had now backed away from the flames at which he had been
blowing, and remained on his hands and knees, apparently assuring
himself that they had really obtained hold. He then rose, and to her
intense surprise began climbing up on to the pile. She watched him at
first with an amused astonishment, so ludicrous was his light little
figure, crowned by stivered-up white hair, and the expression of eager
melancholy on his thin, high-cheekboned face upturned towards her
window. Then, to her dismay, she saw that the flame had really caught,
and, suddenly persuaded that he had some crazy intention of injuring
himself with the view, perhaps, of attracting her attention, she ran out
of her room and down the stairs, and emerging from the back door just
as she was, circled her garden, so that she might enter Mr. Lavender's
garden from behind him, ready for any eventuality. She arrived within
arm's reach of him without his having heard her, for Blink, whose
anxious face as she watched her master wasting, could be discerned at
the bedroom-window, was whining, and Mr. Lavender himself had now broken
into a strange and lamentable chantey, which, in combination with the
creeping flutter of the flames in the weekly journals encircling the
base of the funeral pyre, well-nigh made her blood curdle.

"Aurora," sang Mr. Lavender, in that most dolorous voice,

"Aurora, my heart I bring,
For I know well it will not burn,
Oh! when the leaves puff out in Spring
And when the leaves in Autumn turn
Think, think of me!
Aurora, I pass away!
Upon my horse of air I ride;
Here let my grizzled ashes stay,
But take, ah! take my heart inside!
Aurora! Aurora!"

At this moment, just as a fit of the most uncontrollable laughter was
about to seize her, she saw a flame which had just consumed the word
Horatio reach Mr. Lavender's right calf.

"Oh!" he cried out in desperate tones, str