Avon Fantasy Reader No. 12 — page 115: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

weren't by way of waiting to see whether the Canon in residence— Mr. Henstow it was—would come to the vestries and fine ’em, but I don’t believe he did: for one thing I fancy he’d read the wrong lesson for the first time in his life, and knew it. Anyhow, Evans and me didn’t find no difficulty in slipping up the stairs as I told you, and when we got up we laid ourselves down flat on our stomachs where we could just stretch our heads out over the old tomb, and we hadn’t but just done so when we heard the verger that was then, first shutting the iron porch-gates and locking the southwest door, and then the tran- sept door, so we knew there was something up, and they meant to keep the public out for a bit. “Next thing was, the Dean and the Canon come in by their door on the north, and then I see my father, and old Palmer, and a couple of their best men, and Palmer stood a talking for a bit with the Dean in the middle of the choir. He had a coil of rope and the men had crows. All of ‘em looked a bit nervous. So there they stood talking, and at last Lheard the Dean say, ‘Well, I've no time to waste, Palmer, If you think this'll satisfy Southminster people, PI permit it to be done; but T must say this, that never in the whole course of my life have 1 heard such { arrant nonsense from a practical man as I have from you. Don't you ) ‘agree with me, Henslow?’ As far as I could hear Mr. Henslow said ‘something like ‘Oh, well! we're told, aren’t we, Mr. Dean, not to judge + others?’ And the Dean he gave a kind of sniff, and walked straight up to the tomb, and took his stand behind it with his back to the screen, F and the others they come edging up rather gingerly. Henslow, he », stopped on the south side and scratched on his chin, he did. Then » the Dean spoke up: ‘Paliner,’ he says, ‘which can you do easiest, get » the slab off the top. or shift one of the side slabs? “Old Palmer and his men they pottered about a bit looking round the edge of the top slab and sounding the sides on the south and cast and west and everywhere but the north. Henslow said something about it being better to have a try at the south side, because there was more light and more room to move about in, Then my father, who'd been watching of therm, went round to the north side, and kneli down and felt of the slab by the chink, and he got up and dusted his kuves and says to the Dean: “Beg pardon, Mr. Dean, but | think if Mr. Palmer ll try this here slab he'll find it'll come out easy enough. Seciis to me one of the men could prise it out with his crow by means of isis © chink” ‘Ah! thank you, Worby, says the Dean; ‘that’s a pood suyses- tion. Palmer, let one of your men do that, will your” “So the man come round, and put his bar jn and bore on it, and ‘ust that minute when they were all bending over, and we boys got ou heads well over the edge of the triforium, there Come a most Towtul crash down at the west end of the choir, as if a whole stack of big timber had fallen down a flight of stairs. Well, you can bexpect me to 118 comicbooks.com