the third time, the back-door was burst open by Ebenezer, the milkman, who cried out that the Dame’s cow-house was on fire.  He could see the old lady now, with the child’s shrinking fingers firmly gripped in hers, her horny old hand arrested in the act of descending on the little pink palm (which escaped scot-free in the confusion) while she gazed for a moment, open-mouthed, at the speaker, as though she had come to a word which she couldn’t spell, then jumped up with surprising quickness and hobbled across the floor without her stick, the point of her mob-cap nodding to every part of the room, while she moved the whole of herself first to one side and then to the other as she walked, like one of the geese waddling across the common.

“Goo back and mind yerr book!” cried the old lady to the sharp-eyed little boy, who was peeping round her skirts.  But he did not go back.  Who could, when they saw those tongues of flame shooting up, and the volumes of smoke darkening the summer sky, as the wooden shed and the palings near it caught and smoked and crackled, and heard the cries of men and boys shouting for water and more water, which old Jack Foster, and idiot Tom, and some women, with baskets hastily deposited by the roadside, and even boys not much bigger than himself, were toiling to bring as fast as possible in pails from the brook, before the flames should spread to the row of cottages so perilously near?  No earthly power could have kept the mite out of the fray.  Before the old dame knew where he was, his little hands were clenched round the handle of a heavy iron pail, and he was struggling up the yard to where the men were tearing down the connecting fences, in a desperate endeavour to stay the onrush, of the flames.  To and fro, to and fro, the child toiled, begrimed by falling blacks, scorched by the blaze, his whole mind intent on one thing—­to stop the burning of that charred and tottering mass.

It was done at last, and the cottages were saved.  The rescue party dispersed, and the dirty, tired boy strayed slowly homeward down the village street.  He could see himself now arriving soot-covered, and well-nigh speechless with fatigue, at his mother’s door, could hear the cries and exclamations that arose at the sight of him, could feel the tender hands that removed the clothes from his hot little body, and washed him, and put him to bed.  It took him several days to recover from the fever into which he had put himself, and it was then he had begun to mind the baby instead of going to school.  Praise was liberally bestowed in the county paper on Mr. Ebenezer Rooke and his assistants, who by their energy and forethought had saved the village from destruction but no one had noticed the efforts of the tiny child, working beyond his strength; and, indeed, he himself had had no idea of being noticed.