EVIDENCE.
"What's all this I hear about the Abbey?" said my friend Truscott when I met him yesterday.
Truscott has just returned from New Zealand and is for the moment a little behind the times. But he can pick up the threads as quickly as most men.
"It's in a bad way," I told him. "All kinds of defects in the fabric, and there's a public fund to make it sound again. You ought to subscribe."
"It may be in disrepair," he replied, "but it isn't going to fall down just yet. I know; I went to see it this morning."
"But how do you know?" I asked. "You may guess; you can't know."
"I know," he said, "because I was told. A little bird told me, and there's no authority half so good. Do you remember a few years ago a terrific storm that blew down half the elms in Kensington Gardens?"
I remembered. I had reason; for the trunks and branches were all over the road and my omnibus from Church Street to Piccadilly Circus had to make wide detours.
"Well," Truscott continued, "someone wrote to the papers to say that two or three days before the storm all the rooks left the trees and did not return. They knew what was coming. Birds do know, you know, and that's why I feel no immediate anxiety about the Abbey."