or killed, for the roof of the barn had fallen in.
After some little time, however, and after much struggling on my part, I
was able to allay their fears by appearing before them. It required no
small amount of pluck--as I call it--to face them--bootless, coatless,
vestless, hatless, penniless, and, withal, with my feet and trousers
besmeared with cow dung. But there is a time in every man's life when he
shall come to evoke sympathy from his fellows. "He's coming!" they said,
"Here he is!" they shouted, and as I passed along the ranks I was the
object of universal sympathy in my woe-bestricken condition.

A CHATTY, QUIZZY, KINDLY POLICEMAN

A policeman came up to me and said they thought I was in the flames. I
rashly told him that I might as well have been, considering my
appearance. "Oh, you will get over that," said the gentleman in blue
cloth. "Where do you belong to?" I said I was a native of Keighley. "Who
is your police superintendent?" he queried. "Mr Cheeseborough," I
replied. "That's true," he said. "Know you any in the force there?"
"Yes," I said, "I know Sergeant Kershaw, and another little ill-natured
dog, Jack o' Marks. Jack goes about in plainclothes, and is about as fly
as a box of monkeys." "All right," returned Mr Policeman. "Now that you
have told me the truth, were any of you smoking in the barn?" "No, we
were all asleep," said I. Then he said that would do, and as he had no
orders to arrest me, I could go--till further orders. I learned from him
that Mr Norton--the gentleman for whom I had been working at the
mill--owned the barn, but he was away and would not be home that day.

THE RESULT OF THE FIRE

The merciless fiend did its work, and before the arrival of anything
worthy the designation "fire extinguishing apparatus," the barn had been
razed. A farmhouse joined up to the barn, and a portion of this building,
along with some of the furniture, was damaged. The morn was now breaking,
and there was the usual gathering of quizzing onlookers. It turned out
that I was the last man out of the barn. Some of my bed-fellows, I found,
were as guilty as myself in disregarding the force of the proverb "Look
before you leap," for one of them, in making his hurried exit, jumped
through the first opening he came across to find himself in the
stables--"in a manger for his bed." Through the fall he sustained a
broken arm. One or two of the others were a little hurt.

CLOTHING THE NAKED

Bu