aying, "What
I am, I was born; what I am, I must be."

I went downstairs once that night and peeked in through the curtains.
The Judge was at his desk with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes
looking out from under his heavy eyebrows, as if he had the puzzle of
the world in front of him and was almost afraid. I thought of how tired
he must be and of what a day it had been for all of us.

At last a board squeaked on the stairs, reminding me of the late hour
and my aching body and burning eyes. So I went up to bed and tossed
about until I fell asleep.

I know I could not have slept very soundly. Little matters stick in the
memory if they are connected with such affairs. And so I remember half
waking to hear the slam of a blind and the howl of a wind that had
sprung up. Things were rattling everywhere with every gust of it--the
curtains, the papers on my bureau, the leaves on the trees outside, and
I pulled the sheet over my head and thought of how my father and mother
had gone down at sea, and fell into dreams of oceans of melted lead
hissing and steaming and red.

I think it was the shout of some man that woke me, but that is neither
here nor there. The house was afire! Yellow, dancing light and smoke
poured under the door like something turned out of a pail. With every
puff of the wind the trees in the orchard were all lit up and the flames
yelled as if they were a thousand men far away and shouting together.
Between the gusts you could hear the gentle snap and crackle and the
splitting of sap in wood and a body's own coughing when it tried to
breathe in the solid mass of smoke. There were shouts of people outside,
too, and the squeaking and scampering of rats through the walls. Out of
my window I could see one great cloud of red sparks. They had burst out
after a heat explosion and I heard the rattle and tinkle of a broken
window above the roar of the fire.

Of this terrible element I always had an unreasoning terror. Many a
sleepless night I spent when I was with Madame Welstoke, and all because
our rooms might happen to be high up in the hotel where we had put up.
You can believe that I forgot all and everything when I opened my door
and found that the little flames were already licking the wall on the
front stairs and smoke was rolling in great biscuit-shaped clouds
through the leaping pink light. I could not have told where I was,
whether in our house or city or another. And I only knew that I could
hear