o extricate
them in order to proceed with their execution, an opportunity was
afforded them to raise themselves erect and look about them.

Other houses had taken fire; Bazeilles was now a roaring, blazing
furnace. Flames had begun to appear at the tall windows of the church
and were creeping upward toward the roof. Some soldiers who were driving
a venerable lady from her home had compelled her to furnish the matches
with which to fire her own beds and curtains. Lighted by blazing brands
and fed by petroleum in floods, fires were rising and spreading in every
quarter; it was no longer civilized warfare, but a conflict of savages,
maddened by the long protracted strife, wreaking vengeance for their
dead, their heaps of dead, upon whom they trod at every step they took.
Yelling, shouting bands traversed the streets amid the scurrying smoke
and falling cinders, swelling the hideous uproar into which entered
sounds of every kind: shrieks, groans, the rattle of musketry, the crash
of falling walls. Men could scarce see one another; great livid clouds
drifted athwart the sun and obscured his light, bearing with them an
intolerable stench of soot and blood, heavy with the abominations of the
slaughter. In every quarter the work of death and destruction still went
on: the human brute unchained, the imbecile wrath, the mad fury, of man
devouring his brother man.

And Weiss beheld his house burn before his eyes. Some soldiers had
applied the torch, others fed the flame by throwing upon it the
fragments of the wrecked furniture. The _rez-de-chaussee_ was quickly in
a blaze, the smoke poured in dense black volumes from the wounds in the
front and roof. But now the dyehouse adjoining was also on fire, and
horrible to relate, the voice of little Charles, lying on his bed
delirious with fever, could be heard through the crackling of the
flames, beseeching his mother to bring him a draught of water, while the
skirts of the wretched woman who, with her disfigured face, lay across
the door-sill, were even then beginning to kindle.

"Mamma, mamma, I am thirsty! Mamma, bring me a drink of water--"

The weak, faint voice was drowned in the roar of the conflagration; the
cheering of the victors rose on the air in the distance.

But rising above all other sounds, dominating the universal clamor, a
terrible cry was heard. It was Henriette, who had reached the place at
last, and now beheld her husband, backed up against the wall, facing a