d above it like a torch into the midnight sky.

So stood the Dean, and as the church broke thus into a very beacon
kindled upon a hill,--sank forward without a sign, his face against the
table, stricken.

You need to see a fire in a place such as Mariposa, a town still half of
wood, to know what fire means. In the city it is all different. To
the onlooker, at any rate, a fire is only a spectacle, nothing more.
Everything is arranged, organized, certain. It is only once perhaps in a
century that fire comes to a large city as it comes to the little wooden
town like Mariposa as a great Terror of the Night.

That, at any rate, is what it meant in Mariposa that night in April, the
night the Church of England Church burnt down. Had the fire gained but
a hundred feet, or less, it could have reached from the driving shed
behind the church to the backs of the wooden shops of the Main Street,
and once there not all the waters of Lake Wissanotti could stay the
course of its destruction. It was for that hundred feet that they
fought, the men of Mariposa, from the midnight call of the bell till the
slow coming of the day. They fought the fire, not to save the church,
for that was doomed from the first outbreak of the flames, but to stop
the spread of it and save the town. They fought it at the windows,
and at the blazing doors, and through the yawning furnace of the open
belfry; fought it, with the Mariposa engine thumping and panting in the
street, itself aglow with fire like a servant demon fighting its own
kind, with tall ladders reaching to the very roof, and with hose that
poured their streams of tossing water foaming into the flames.

Most of all they fought to save the wooden driving shed behind the
church from which the fire could leap into the heart of Mariposa. That
was where the real fight was, for the life of the town. I wish you could
have seen how they turned the hose against the shingles, ripping and
tearing them from their places with the force of the driven water: how
they mounted on the roof, axe in hand, and cut madly at the rafters
to bring the building down, while the black clouds of smoke rolled in
volumes about the men as they worked. You could see the fire horses
harnessed with logging chains to the uprights of the shed to tear the
building from its place.

Most of all I wish you could have seen Mr. Smith, proprietor, as I think
you know, of Smith's Hotel, there on the roof with a fireman's helmet
on,