ts clash and murmur. Inside is his candle, his table, his ink, his
pen, and his dreams. He is thinking, and the walls are pierced with beams
of sunshine, slipping through young green. A fountain tosses itself up at
the blue sky, and through the spattered water in the basin he can see
copper carp, lazily floating among cold leaves. A wind-harp in a
cedar-tree grieves and whispers, and words blow into his brain, bubbled,
iridescent, shooting up like flowers of fire, higher and higher. Boom! The
flame-flowers snap on their slender stems. The fountain rears up in long
broken spears of disheveled water and flattens into the earth. Boom! And
there is only the room, the table, the candle, and the sliding rain.
Again, Boom!--Boom!--Boom! He stuffs his fingers into his ears. He sees
corpses, and cries out in fright. Boom! It is night, and they are shelling
the city! Boom! Boom!

A child wakes and is afraid, and weeps in the darkness. What has made the
bed shake? "Mother, where are you? I am awake." "Hush, my Darling, I am
here." "But, Mother, something so queer happened, the room shook." Boom!
"Oh! What is it? What is the matter?" Boom! "Where is Father? I am so
afraid." Boom! The child sobs and shrieks. The house trembles and creaks.
Boom!

Retorts, globes, tubes, and phials lie shattered. All his trials oozing
across the floor. The life that was his choosing, lonely, urgent, goaded
by a hope, all gone. A weary man in a ruined laboratory, that was his
story. Boom! Gloom and ignorance, and the jig of drunken brutes. Diseases
like snakes crawling over the earth, leaving trails of slime. Wails from
people burying their dead. Through the window he can see the rocking
steeple. A ball of fire falls on the lead of the roof, and the sky tears
apart on a spike of flame. Up the spire, behind the lacings of stone,
zig-zagging in and out of the carved tracings, squirms the fire. It spouts
like yellow wheat from the gargoyles, coils round the head of Saint John,
and aureoles him in light. It leaps into the night and hisses against the
rain. The Cathedral is a burning stain on the white, wet night.

Boom! The Cathedral is a torch, and the houses next to it begin to scorch.
Boom! The bohemian glass on the _etagere_ is no longer there. Boom! A
stalk of flame sways against the red damask curtains. The old lady cannot
walk. She watches the creeping stalk and counts. Boom!--Boom!--Boom!

The poet rushes into the street, and the rain wraps him i