dy, I was once
determined just to let her drop down upon the street; but I knew that the
so doing would have cracked every bone in her body, and the glory of my
bravery would thus have been worse than lost. I persevered, therefore,
though I was fit to fall down under the dead weight, she not being able
to help herself, and having a deal of beef in her skin for an old woman
of eighty; but I got a lean, by squeezing her a wee between me and the
wall.

I thought they would never have come, for my shoeless feet were all
bruised, and bleeding from the crunched lime and the splinters of broken
stones; but at long and last, a ladder was hoisted up, and having
fastened a kinch of ropes beneath her oxters, I let her slide down over
the upper step, by way of a pillyshee, having the satisfaction of seeing
her safely landed in the arms of seven old wives, that were waiting with
a cosey warm blanket below. Having accomplished this grand manoeuvre,
wherein I succeeded in saving the precious life of a woman of eighty,
that had been four long years bedridden, I tripped down the steps myself
like a nine-year-old, and had the pleasure, when the roof fell in, to
know that I for one had done my duty; and that, to the best of my
knowledge, no living creature except the poor cat had perished within the
jaws of the devouring element.

But, bide a wee; the work was, as yet, only half done. The fire was
still roaring and raging, every puff of wind that blew through the black
firmament, driving the red sparks high into the air, where they died away
like the tail of a comet, or the train of a skyrocket; the joisting
crazing, cracking, and tumbling down; and now and then the bursting cans
playing flee in a hundred flinders from the chimney-heads. One would
have naturally enough thought that our engine could have drowned out a
fire of any kind whatsoever in half a second, scores of folk driving
about with pitcherfuls of water, and scaling half of it on one another
and the causey in their hurry; but woe's me! it did not play puh on the
red-het stones, that whizzed like iron in a smiddy trough; so, as soon as
it was darkness and smoke in one place, it was fire and fury in another.

My anxiety was great; seeing that I had done my best for my neighbours,
it behoved me now, in my turn, to try and see what I could do for myself;
so, notwithstanding the remonstrances of my friend James Batter--whom
Nanse, knowing I had bare feet, had sent out to see