en then. It was like a scene in a motion picture
play.

My first thought was to check, to hold back the flames, till help came.
The garden hose was lying out under a tree (I had put it there the day
before) and with desperate haste I hurried to attach it to the water
pipes. I saw father in the yard, but he uttered no word. We were each
thinking the same thought--"_The old homestead is doomed. Our life here
is ended._"

The hose was heavy and sanely perverse, and it seemed an age before I
had the water turned on. Catching up the nozzle I approached the kitchen
door. The thin stream had no effect, and the heat was so intense I could
not face it. Throwing down the hose I reentered the house.

The children, hysterical with fright, were just leaving by the east door
and Zulime was upstairs. Opening the front door I stepped out upon the
porch to call for help. The beauty of the morning, its stillness, its
serenity, its odorous opulence, struck upon my senses with a kind of
ironic benignancy, as if to say, "Why agonize over so small a thing?"

I shouted "Fire!" and my voice went ringing far up the street. I cried
out again, a third time, a fourth, but no one answered, no one appeared,
and behind me the crackling roar of the flames increased. In despair I
turned back into the sitting-room.

It had been arranged between Zulime and myself that in case of fire
(once the children were safe), she was to secure the silverware and her
jewelry whilst I flew to collect my manuscripts.

With this thought in my mind, and believing that I had but a few minutes
in which to work, I ran up the stairs to my study and began gathering
such of my manuscripts as had no duplicates. As I thought of the
hundreds of letters from my literary friends, of the many family
records, of the innumerable notes, pictures, keepsakes, souvenirs and
mementoes which had been assembling there for a quarter of a century, I
became confused, indecisive. It was so hard to choose. At last I caught
up a sheaf of unpublished stories which filled one drawer, and beating
off the screen of the north window threw the manuscripts out upon the
grass.

A neighbor's wife, quick to understand the meaning of my anxiety about
these sheets, ran to her home across the way and bringing a valise,
began to stuff them into it. Having cleared my desk of its most valuable
papers I hurried to my dressing-room to secure shoes and trousers; but
by this time the hall was full of the most