led to a hearing. But Mad Bell merely
replied, "Whisht gabbin', and hould that," thrusting, as she spoke, her
little handkerchief bundle into his arms. And thereupon, making a sudden
dive, she vanished among the flame-sheathing smoke.

Scarcely had she disappeared when an empty donkey-cart came round the
turn of the lane, led by a rather dejected-looking middle-aged man,
whose countenance, nevertheless, had for some time back been gradually
clearing up at every wind of the way that brought him nearer to this
particular point of view. But as he caught sight of the black smoke
drifting and rolling, his aspect of reasonable melancholy changed to one
of a despair that could not have been wilder if the reek of hell-mouth
had blown into his face. He dropped the bridle, and hurled himself down
the road like the distracted body that he well might be. For a
twelvemonth ago he had lost his wife and both his elder children in one
week, and his pair of two-year-old twins were now all that stood between
himself and world-wide desolation. At the front door his frantic rush
was met and baffled by a choking puff, which sent him fleeing round in
hopes that entrance might be more possible through the back; and on the
way he came face to face with the wrathful visages of his son and
daughter, whom Mad Bell was carrying in the disregardful manner that
betides a cumbrous load snatched up in a mortal hurry. She had escaped
by the back door.

If the most radiant of guardian angels, in snowy plumes and golden
tresses, had restored his children to him with a befitting speech, poor
Matthew Wogan could not well have been more joyfully relieved from his
terror than he was when this odd little yellow-faced woman, with a red
handkerchief wisped round her head, and a singed grimness generally
pervading her, handed over to him Minnie and Tom, casually remarking,
"Bedad, it's the big heavy lumps they are." Minnie and Tom both were
crying and coughing loudly, because the smoke had got into their eyes
and throats, which they resented; and when their father returned with
them to the front of the house, this noise was swelled by the gleeful
yap-yapping of the terrier and the voices of a few other people who had
appeared upon the scene--a matronly looking woman and two or three
sun-burnt harvestmen. From Mrs. Massey's observations it could be
gathered that she had been minding the Wogan twins by deputy, and
further that she entertained the gloomiest views