Early in the following April he conceived a wish to build a small greenhouse at the foot of his garden, by the road, and spoke to the local mason about it.  One Saturday afternoon the mason came over to look at the ground and discuss plans.  It was bright weather, and while the two men talked a white butterfly floated past them—­the first of the year.

Immediately the mason broke off his sentence and began to chase the butterfly round the garden:  for in the West country there is a superstition that if a body neglect to kill the first butterfly he may see for the season, he will have ill luck throughout the year.  So he dashed across the beds, hat in hand.

“I’ll hat ’en—­I’ll hat ’en!  No, fay!  I’ll miss ’en, I b’lieve.  Shan’t be able to kill ‘n if hor’s wunce beyond th’ gaate—­stiddy, my son!  Wo-op!”

Thus he yelled, waving his soft hat:  and the next minute was lying stunned across a carrot-bed, with eight fingers gripping the back of his neck and two thumbs squeezing on his windpipe.

There was another assault case heard by the Lewminster bench; and this time the ex-engine-driver received four months.  As before, he offered no defence:  and again the magistrates were possessed with wonder.

Now the explanation is quite simple.  This man’s wits were sound, save on one point.  He believed—­why, God alone knows, who enabled him to drive that horrible journey without a tremor of the hand—­that his wife’s soul haunted him in the form of a white butterfly or moth.  The superstition that spirits take this shape is not unknown in the West; and I suppose that as he steered his train out of the station, this fancy, by some odd freak of memory, leaped into his brain, and held it, hour after hour, while he and his engine flew forward and the burning theatre fell further and further behind.  The truth was known a fortnight after his return from prison, which happened about the time of barley harvest.

A harvest-thanksgiving was held in the parish where he lived; and he went to it, being always a religious man.  There were sheaves and baskets of vegetables in the chancel; fruit and flowers on the communion-table, with twenty-one tall candles burning above them; a processional hymn; and a long sermon.  During the sermon, as the weather was hot and close, someone opened the door at the west end.

And when the preacher was just making up his mind to close the discourse, a large white moth fluttered in at the west door.

There was much light throughout the church; but the great blaze came, of course, from the twenty-one candles upon the altar.  And towards this the moth slowly drifted, as if the candles sucked her nearer and nearer, up between the pillars of the nave, on a level with their capitals.  Few of the congregation noticed her, for the sermon was a stirring one; only one or two children, perhaps, were interested—­and the man I write of.  He saw her pass over his head and float up into the chancel.  He half-rose from his chair.