en shown to its awful full the
next by the sudden tearing through of lightning-flashes. He saw it
all--houses, churches, towers, erect and with steadfast line, a
silhouette of quiet rest awaiting dawn; then at a flash, the doom, the
quake, the breaking down of outline, the caving in of walls, followed by
the sickening collapse in which life, wealth, and innumerable beating
human hearts went down into the unseen and unknowable. He saw and he
heard, but his eyes clung to but one point, his ears listened for but
one cry. There at the extremity of a cornice, clinging to a bending
beam, was the figure again--the woman of the ice-floe and the desert.
She seemed nearer now. He could see the straining muscles of her arm,
the white despair of her set features. He wished to call aloud to her
not to look down--then, as the sudden darkness yielded to another
illuminating gleam, his mind changed and he would fain have begged her
to look, slip, and end all, for subtly, quietly, ominously somewhere
below her feet, he had caught the glimpsing of a feathery line of smoke
curling up from the lower debris. Flame was there; a creeping devil
which soon----

Horror! it was no dream! He was awake, he, Hammersmith, in this small
solitary hotel in Ohio, and there was fire, real fire in the air, and in
his ears the echo of a shriek such as a man hears but few times in his
life, even if his lot casts him continually among the reckless and the
suffering. Was it _hers_? Had these dreams been forerunners of some
menacing danger? He was on his feet, his eyes staring at the floor
beneath him, through the cracks of which wisps of smoke were forcing
their way up. The tavern was not only on fire, _but on fire directly
under him_. This discovery woke him effectually. He bounded to the door;
it would not open. He wrenched at the key; but it would not turn, it was
hampered in the lock. Drawing back, he threw his whole weight against
the panels, uttering loud cries for help. The effort was useless. No
yielding in the door, no rush to his assistance from without. Aroused
now to his danger--reading the signs of the broken cord and hampered
lock only too well--he desisted from his vain attempts and turned
desperately toward the window. Though it might be impossible to hold up
the sash and crawl under it at the same time, his only hope of exit lay
there, as well as his only means of surviving the inroad of smoke which
was fast becoming unendurable. He would brea