Usher

The eminent Usher was regarding the bellowing monster with an amazement which had dried up all other sentiments.

"I reckon the Cosmos is cracked," said Usher, and fell asprawl in his round office chair.

"Who in hell are you?" yelled Usher, suddenly sitting up straight.

"Why, look here, Mr Usher," said Father Brown quietly, "you said the machine couldn't make a mistake; and in one sense it didn't.

Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality--of the constrained effort of the ennuye man of the world.

Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed.

It was the work of the rushing gust--but then without those doors there DID stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.

The whole discipline of the school out of lesson hours was in the hands of the two ushers, one of whom was always with the boys in their playground, in the school, at meals--in fact, at all times and every where, till they were fairly in bed at night.

The whole fifty boys started after dinner with one of the ushers for Hazeldown, which was distant some mile or so from the school.

The fame of this exploit having spread to the other rooms, and being discredited there, the young necromancer declared that the same wonder would appear in all the rooms in turn, which it accordingly did; and the whole circumstances having been privately reported to one of the ushers as usual, that functionary, after listening about at the doors of the rooms, by a sudden descent caught the performer in his night-shirt, with a box of phosphorus in his guilty hand.