ye've felled me--but no matter, now I've gotten ye roused. Do ye no see
the haill street in a bleeze of flames? Bad is the best; we maun either
be burned to death, or out of house and hall, without a rag to cover our
nakedness. Where's my son?--where's my dear bairn Benjie?"

In a most awful consternation, I jumped at this out to the middle of the
floor, hearing the causeway all in an uproar of voices; and seeing the
flichtering of the flames glancing on the houses in the opposite side of
the street, all the windows of which were filled with the heads of
half-naked folks, in round-eared mutches or Kilmarnocks; their mouths
open, and their eyes staring with fright; while the sound of the
fire-engine, rattling through the streets like thunder, seemed like the
dead-cart of the plague, come to hurry away the corpses of the deceased
for interment in the kirk-yard.

Never such a spectacle was witnessed in this world of sin and sorrow
since the creation of Adam. I pulled up the window and looked out--and,
lo and behold! the very next house to our own was all in a low from
cellar to garret; the burning joists hissing and cracking like mad; and
the very wind that blew along, as warm as if it had been out of the mouth
of a baker's oven!!

It was a most awful spectacle! more by token to me, who was likely to be
intimately concerned with it; and beating my brow with my clenched nieve,
like a distracted creature, I saw that the labour of my whole life was
likely to go for nought, and me to be a ruined man; all the earnings of
my industry being laid out on my stock in trade, and on the plenishing of
our bit house. The darkness of the latter days came over my spirit like
a vision before the prophet Isaiah; and I could see nothing in the years
to come but beggary and starvation; myself a fallen-back old man, with an
out-at-the-elbows coat, a greasy hat, and a bald pow, hirpling over a
staff, requeeshting an awmous--Nanse a broken-hearted beggar wife, torn
down to tatters, and weeping like Rachel when she thought on better
days--and poor wee Benjie going from door to door with a meal-pock on his
back.

The thought first dung me stupid, and then drove me to desperation; and
not even minding the dear wife of my bosom, that had fainted away as dead
as a herring, I pulled on my trowsers like mad, and rushed out into the
street, bareheaded and barefoot as the day that Lucky Bringthereout
dragged me into the world.

The crowd saw in