skeletons told
a pitiful story. Blinded by smoke and flame, made frantic by the red death
that was sweeping the forest, confused, terror-stricken, weakened by gas
and fumes, the poor beasts had finally crowded together and perished under
the onrushing wave of fire. For a moment the boys gazed at the scene in
fascinated horror; then they turned away, to shut out the picture. They
were oppressed, almost stunned.

They went on. Not a vestige of its former magnificent vegetation covered
the slope. Nothing in the world could be more awful, more desolate, more
disheartening to behold than the area the two chums were now crossing.
Never had either seen anything that so oppressed him. For not only had the
slope of Old Ironsides been laid waste, but the entire bottom had been
swept by fire, and the opposite mountain slope devastated. Before them was
nothing but desolation.

Soon they were near enough to see the sparkle of water in the bottom. In
their horror at their immediate surroundings they had temporarily
forgotten even their terrible thirst. The sight of water recalled their
need.

"Thank God water can't burn!" cried Lew, as the sparkle of the brook
caught his eye. "We'd be in a fine pickle if the brook had been consumed,
too."

The prospect of a drink stirred them. They threw off the spell that so
depressed them and hastened downward, reckless alike of menacing branches
and loose stones and obstructing tree trunks. Headlong they pushed
downward. But fortune was with them and neither a broken bone nor a
strained ligament resulted, though more than once each lad slipped and
fell. Presently they reached the bottom of the slope and came to the very
brink of the run. Almost frantically they flung themselves on the ground
and drank.

Long, copious draughts they drank; and it was not until they had quenched
their thirst that they really noticed how shrunken the brook was. Instead
of the deep, rushing mountain stream they had seen when last they visited
the spot, they now found but a slender rivulet that flowed quietly along
the middle of the stream bed, leaving bare, bordering ribbons of stony
bottom along its margins. Nowhere did the water seem to reach from bank to
bank, excepting where some obstruction in the stream bed dammed the
current back. Like the forest, the brook was also a sorrowful picture. But
there was this difference. The forest was dead, whereas the brook, though
feeble, still lived.

The full significa