E. Nesbit

“ But to his own effigy he never spoke, nor to the woman whose face looked out of the burning window, nor to the corpse that lay at the feet of the ladder-bearer. For now there was no room for doubt that it was the figure of a corpse. That change he had made without consulting Mr. Diehl and the syndicate. Its mouth was bloody, as had been the mouth of the little effigy in the Derbyshire cellar, and the mouth of the man whom he had struck down long ago under the eyes of the deserted wife. ”

“ The thing caught on. “Have you seen the Great Fire of London?” people asked each other between dances and during dinners, in the train and on the tops of omnibuses. “Like Mme. Tussaud's? Oh, no—not in the least. It's absolutely thrilling! Just for the first moment you can hardly believe it's not real. You must go!”
And everybody went
And it wax not like Mme. Tussaud's or like any waxwork show that ever was before. To the making of Mme. Tussaud's goes, perhaps, talent. To the making of the Musée Grévin, certainly, genius. But to the making of this went the heart and soul of a man. ”

“ There, by the same token, was the inn, its sign emblazoned with the arms of the local landowner, lit redly by the flames of conflagration. There was the square church tower, flushed against a dark sky; the tombstones in the raised churchyard gleaming rosy beneath the yew shadows. There was a crowd in the street—men with pails and cans of water. This side of the inn half the street was in flames; from the window of a burning house a girl leaned out; below, a man holding a ladder was in the act of planting it against the window. ”

“ He added the “sir” because the note of the voice was distinctly feminine, and he saw that the door would open more readily to one whose honesty of purpose was so clear and fine that it could persist even in the fact of the conviction that there was “a man in the house.” Mr. Diehl's mind—it was not the mind of a fool—pictured a faded woman, her terror at this late visit soothed and charmed by the solid compliments it was part of his trade to sow broadcast, with both hands, on any soil. ”

“ At his feet lay a body—a dead man, as it seemed, but not dead by burning. Blood showed at mouth and nose. The whole thing was worked out, with wax and wood and paint and paper and a dozen odd yet adequate materials, at much less than half life, but so perfect were the perspective and the proportion that that scene would have appeared to a spectator half-way up the village street just as, and not otherwise than, it now appeared to the spectator at the cellar door. ”

“ IF your personal appearance is best described by the enumeration of your clothes, your character by the trade-mark on the gilt waistband of your cigar, and your profession as “just anything that comes along, don't you know,” you are not exactly the right man in the right place, up to your knees in mud, your carriage with a wheel off lying prone in a ditch several fields off, and your chance of getting to the house where a capricious music hall star has given you an inconvenient rendezvous less than the least crumb of the biscuit you wish you had put in your pocket before starting. ”

“ Diehl, glancing at the corpse.
“Yes,” said old April. “I've got the head—I remembered.”
Mr. Diehl went into the enclosure, and the cinders crunched under his boots
“By Jove!” he said, “you're an artist, Vane. I say, Montague, look at this corpse, the thing you didn't like—why, it's the best of the lot. You've improved it. Vane, old chap. It's just the old expression, but, by George! it's more life-like than ever. What is it? Something in the lie of the body, I suppose. It's just like life—isn't it, now, Monty?”
“It's more like death,” said Montague “I don't like it. ”

“ The whole picture—the graduated houses, the little figures of wood and wax and paper, the ingenious lanterns that lighted, the tinsel flames that gleamed—all was taken to London, and set up in a big attic in Fitzroy Street. Mr. Diehl brought men to see it. Men with shiny hats and fur coats, and cigars like his own. And when they had seen they went away and drank brandy and soda at marble-topped tables while Morris Diehl talked. And they “came into it” with him, as he had known they would. April Vane was shy and moody at first ”

“ As a woman of thirty is said to subtract passionately to make a total of twenty-seven, so men who are far gone in their seventies will add to their years, and claim your amazed admiration as gaffers of eighty six.
Diehl looked hard at the old man. ”

“ Diehl a great deal of patience, and his enterprising friends a great deal of money. The big fight was over the subject of the tableau. Vane wanted to reproduce the village scene exactly as it had been burnt into his mind. Diehl wanted the Great Fire of London, with old London Bridge and the heads of the traitors above the gate. But though Vane had been the other man's slave since the night he had thought that he had seen the other man's heart, he was obstinate till Diehl said: “More people will come to the Great Fire of London than just to a village fire ”