Fires Undying

"Day of wrath, oh day of mourning," sang the officiating clergymen at the funeral service in Britain's Leighton Buzzard parish church; "see fulfilled the prophet's warning, heaven and earth in ashes burning."

Suddenly a flickering, ethereal light danced about the venerable head of Rural Dean Cyril A. Wheeler. The back of his snowy surplice had burst into flame from a nearby candle. The dean looked startled, but stood quietly as Leighton's quick-thinking Vicar S. John Forrest hurried over and began beating him on the back with a hymnbook. In a moment the crisis was over. As the solemn Requiem Mass swept sonorously on ("Yet, good Lord, in grace complying, rescue me from fires undying"), Dean Wheeler hurried out to don a new surplice. "I felt unusually warm," he explained later, "but I didn't know I was on fire until the Vicar beat me."

Said the Vicar: "No serious damage--except that he was wearing one of my surplices. They're hard to come by these days."

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