As he sat now on the stool in the sunny doorway, and looked up the mountain-valley, to which he had been brought in his declining years to share his married daughter’s home, the detail in that tragedy of his childhood, which pictured itself in his mind’s eye more clearly than any other, was the shadow of the spreading, coiling puffs of smoke, which had first caught his childish attention, blurring the bars of sunlight on the floor of the Dame’s kitchen.  Perhaps it was on account of the likeness to the pattern now made by the sun, as it shone through the casement between him and the baby’s cradle.  For the gentle, domestic old man was often now, as in his docile childhood, charged to “mind the baby,” and one of the quiet pleasures of his latter days was the sight of the little floweret, that grew so sweetly beside his sere and withered life.  An uncultured sense of beauty within him was appealed to by the rounded limbs, the silent, dimpled laugh, the tottering feet feeling their unknown way, and all the sweet curves and softnesses, the innocent surprises and naive desires, which made up for him the image of “the baby.”  He would have said she was “prutty,” implying much by the word.

As he gazed at his precious charge, and watched the sunlight pattern slowly but surely creeping towards the foot of the cradle, he had an odd feeling that school would soon be over.  A moment after he rubbed his eyes and looked again.  Was it true, or was he dreaming?  Were those shadowy whirls of smoke, dimming the sunshine, a vision of the past, or did he actually see them before him, as of old, coiling about and around the bars of light on the floor?  It was certainly there, the shadow of smoke, and came he could not tell whence; for in all the unpeopled valley there were, of human beings, as far as he knew at that moment, only himself and the baby.  To his mind, so full of the past, it seemed the herald of another danger.

He raised himself with difficulty from his stool, and moved his stiff limbs to the threshold.  As he did so, he noticed that the smoke was within the room as well as without; it was festooning about the baby’s cradle, it was filling the place, there was scarcely air to breathe.  His first idea, as he smelt the soot, and saw the blacks showering on the hearth, was that the chimney was on fire.  He went straight to the baby in its cradle, and, his limbs forgetting their stiffness, lifted her in his arms to carry her to a place of safety; when that was done he would take off the embers from the grate, and sprinkle salt on the hearth to quench the fire.