Dr. Clay’s theory might be true, but it was not clear to them how electricity could go about a house gifted with the cunning of a fiend.  “It is true,” said Dan, “that lightning often sets fire to houses and barns, but it has never yet been known to roam about a man’s house, as this strange power does.  And as Esther can hear it speak, and it does whatever it says it will, why I believe it to be a ghost, or else the devil.”  While Olive was churning in the kitchen one morning about three days after the fire under the bed, she noticed smoke coming from the cellar.  Esther was seated in the dining room when Olive first saw the smoke, and had been seated there for the last hour, previous to which she had been in the kitchen assisting her sister to wash the breakfast dishes as was her custom.  On seeing the smoke, both she and Esther were for the moment utterly paralyzed with fear.  What they so dreaded had at last come to pass.  The house was evidently on fire, and that fire set by a devilish ghost.  What was to be done?  Olive was the first to recover from the shock.  Seizing the bucket of drinking water, always kept standing on the kitchen table, she rushed down the cellar stairs, and was horrified at the sight which burst upon her view.  There in the far corner of the cellar was a barrel of shavings blazing almost to the floor above.  In the meantime Esther had reached the cellar, and stood looking at the crackling flames in blank astonishment.  The water Olive had poured into the barrel was not enough to quench the flames, for in the excitement of the moment she had spilled more than half of it on her way down.  What was to be done?  The house would catch and probably be burned to the ground, and they would be rendered homeless.

“Oh! if Dan were at home, he could put it out,” Olive managed to articulate, for both she and Esther were nearly suffocated with the dense black smoke with which the cellar was filled, and now the barrel itself had caught.  The cellar was very small, and everything in it would soon be blazing unless the fire could be extinguished at once.

“Oh! what shall we do,” cried Esther, “what shall we do?”

“Run out in the street and cry fire as loud as you can.  Come, let’s run at once or the whole house will burn down,” exclaimed Olive, by this time wild with fear.

So, both she and Esther ran up stairs and out into the street, crying “fire! fire!” Of course their cries aroused the whole neighborhood.  At the moment a gentleman, a stranger in the village, who happened to be passing, instantly threw off his coat, rushed into the cottage, picked up a mat from the dining room floor, and was down in the cellar in a second.  He put the fire entirely out, and then, without waiting to be thanked, walked out of the cottage and was soon lost to view in the distance; and, what is remarkably strange, nobody knows who he was or whence he came, for from that day he has not been seen.