Lot No. 249

Of the dealings of Edward Bellingham with William
Monkhouse Lee, and of the cause of the great terror
of Abercrombie Smith, it may be that no absolute and
final judgment will ever be delivered. It is true
that we have the full and clear narrative of Smith
himself, and such corroboration as he could look for
from Thomas Styles the servant, from the Reverend
Plumptree Peterson, Fellow of Old's, and from such
other people as chanced to gain some passing glance
at this or that incident in a singular chain of
events. Yet, in the main, the story must rest upon
Smith alone, and the most will think that it is more
likely that one brain, however outwardly sane, has
some subtle warp in its texture, some strange flaw in
its workings, than that the path of Nature has been
overstepped in open day in so famed a centre of
learning and light as the University of Oxford. Yet
when we think how narrow and how devious this path of
Nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our
lamps of science, and how from the darkness
which girds it round great and terrible possibilities
loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and
confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-
paths into which the human spirit may wander.

In a certain wing of what we will call Old
College in Oxford there is a corner turret of an
exceeding great age. The heavy arch which spans the
open door has bent downwards in the centre under the
weight of its years, and the grey, lichen-blotched
blocks of stone are, bound and knitted together with
withes and strands of ivy, as though the old mother
had set herself to brace them up against wind and
weather. From the door a stone stair curves upward
spirally, passing two landings, and terminating in a
third one, its steps all shapeless and hollowed by
the tread of so many generations of the seekers after
knowledge. Life has flowed like water down this
winding stair, and, waterlike, has left these smooth-
worn grooves behind it. From the long-gowned,
pedantic scholars of Plantagenet days down to the
young bloods of a later age, how full and strong had
been that tide of young English life. And what was
left now of all those hopes, those strivings, those
fiery energies, save here and there in some old-world
churchyard a few scratches upon a stone, and
perchance a handful of dust in a mouldering coffin?
Yet here were the silent stair and the grey old
wall, with bend and saltire and many another heraldic
device still to be read upon its surface, like
grotesque shadows thrown back from the days that had
passed.

In the month of May, in the year 1884, three
young men occupied the sets of rooms which opened on
to the separate landings of