the voice of my old mistress saying, "Remember, if we do have
trouble, to cover your face with a wet towel and keep close to the
floor." It was senseless advice, because the fire, that must have
started in the Judge's study, kept blowing out into the hall through the
doorway, and then disappearing again like a waving silk flag. I opened
my mouth and screamed until my lungs were as flat as empty sacks.

I might have known that the Judge, if he were still in the library, was
not alive, and I might have noticed, as I went through his sleeping-room
to climb out on the roof of the front porch, that he had not been to bed
at all. But it was all a blank to me. I did not remember that there was
a Judge. Fire and its licking tongue was after me and I threw myself off
the hot tin roof and landed among the hydrangea bushes below. In a
second more I felt the cool grass of the lawn under my running feet, and
the first time that I felt my reasoning power come to me I found myself
wondering how I had stopped to button a skirt and throw a shawl around
my shoulders.

There were half a dozen men. Where they had come from I do not know.
They were rushing here and there across the lawn and vaulting the fence.
They did not seem to notice me at all. I heard one of them shout, "The
fire alarm won't work! You can't save the house!" Everything seemed
confused. Other people were coming down the street, running and
shouting, sparks burst out somewhere and whirled around and around in a
cloud, as if they were going up into the black sky on a spiral
staircase. The walls of the grocery and the Fidelity Building and the
Danforths' residence across the street were all lit up with the red
light, and a dash of flames, coming out our library window, shriveled up
a shrub that grew there as if it was made of dry tissue paper.

"How did it start?" yelled a man, shaking me.

I only opened my mouth and looked at him. He was the grocer. I had
ordered things from him every morning.

"Well, who was in the house?" he said.

"The Judge," I said.

"The Judge is in the house!" he began to roar. "The Judge is in the
house!"

It sounded exactly like the telephone when it says, "The line is busy,
please ring off," and it seemed to make the people run together in
little clusters and point and move across the lawn to where the sparks
were showering down, and then back, like a dog that wants to get a
chop-bone out of a hot grate.

Suddenly every one seemed to