When we said that the firemen returned to their respective stations, it must not be supposed that the house which had been burnt was left in forlorn wretchedness. No; one of the firemen remained to watch over it, and guard against the upstarting of any sneaking¹ spark that might have managed to conceal² itself.

 

The man selected for this duty was Joe Corney.

 

Unfortunately for Joe, this was the only part of a fireman’s duty that he did not relish³.

 

Joe Corney was, both by nature and education, very superstitious⁴. He believed implicitly⁵ in ghosts, and knew an innumerable host of persons, male and female, who had seen people who said they had seen ghosts. He was too honest to say he had ever seen a ghost himself; but he had been “very near seein’ wan⁶ two or three times,” and he lived in perpetual expectation and dread⁷ of meeting one face to face before he died. Joe was as brave as a lion, and faced danger, and sometimes even what appeared to be certain death, with as much unflinching courage as the bravest of his comrades. Once, in particular, he had walked with the branch in his hands along the burning roof of a tottering⁸ warehouse⁹, near the docks, in order to gain a point from which he could play on the flames so as to prevent them spreading to the next warehouse, and so check a fire which might have easily become one of the “great fires of London.”

 

Joe was therefore a man who could not be easily frightened; yet Joe trembled in his shoes when he had the most distant

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