fragments of tinder away upon the carpet.

“I wish I hadn’t burned them quite so much,” he said regretfully. “Had I had a newspaper handy I could have lit that instead. Or—or I might easily have delayed their destruction until—until after the end. Yet he seemed quite conscious, up to the very last moment. No wonder he regretted death before the fulfilment of the great work he had commenced—no wonder he contemplated moving to the Grand Hotel at an early date! And yet,” he added, after a pause, “it’s all very intricate, very indistinct, and requires a greater scholar than myself to properly understand and unravel it.”

The chief document, consisting of about ten typewritten pages in English, had been badly burned. It was this which he was now engaged in trying to decipher. At the top left-hand corner the sheets had originally been held together by a paper-fastener, but that corner had been consumed as well as all round the edges. The centre alone of three folios remained readable, even though it had been yellowed by smoke.

“There seem very many references to Israel, to Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, and to the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. Yet they seem to convey nothing. Ah!” he sighed, “if only I could reconstruct the context. There are Biblical references, too. I must obtain a Bible.”

So he rose, rang for a waiter, and asked him whether there was such a thing in the hotel as a copy of Holy Writ.

The man, a young German, naturally regarded the visitor as an eccentric person or a religious crank, but he went at once and borrowed a small Bible from the chambermaid—a volume which afterwards proved to contain, between its leaves, small texts of her Sunday-school days, several pressed flowers, and a lock of hair.

A reference given upon one of the crinkled folios was “Ezekiel xxviii, 24.”

Reseating himself after the young German had left, Raymond Diamond hastily turned over the pages of the little well-thumbed Bible and found what proved to be the prophecy of the restoration of Israel.

Another reference in the next line of the half-burnt screed was Ezekiel xl, xli and xlii, no verses being designated.

On turning to these chapters, the doctor found that they contained a description of Ezekiel’s vision of the measuring of the temple.

Continuing, he read the further dimensions of the temple, the size of the chambers for the priests, and 

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