What had happened?  In the confusion of moving books and other articles to the doctor’s house, doors and windows had been forgotten.  Among the rest a window opening into the cellar, where some old furniture had been left by a former occupant, had been left unclosed.  One of the lazy natives, who had lounged by the house smoking a bad cigar, had thrown the burning stump in at this open window.  He had no particular intention of doing mischief, but he had that indifference to consequences which is the next step above the inclination to crime.  The burning stump happened to fall among the straw of an old mattress which had been ripped open.  The smoker went his way without looking behind him, and it so chanced that no other person passed the house for some time.  Presently the straw was in a blaze, and from this the fire extended to the furniture, to the stairway leading up from the cellar, and was working its way along the entry under the stairs leading up to the apartment where Maurice was lying.

The blaze was fierce and swift, as it could not help being with such a mass of combustibles,—­loose straw from the mattress, dry old furniture, and old warped floors which had been parching and shrinking for a score or two of years.  The whole house was, in the common language of the newspaper reports, “a perfect tinder-box,” and would probably be a heap of ashes in half an hour.  And there was this unfortunate deserted sick man lying between life and death, beyond all help unless some unexpected assistance should come to his rescue.

As the attendant drew near the house where Maurice was lying, he was horror-struck to see dense volumes of smoke pouring out of the lower windows.  It was beginning to make its way through the upper windows, also, and presently a tongue of fire shot out and streamed upward along the side of the house.  The man shrieked Fire!  Fire! with all his might, and rushed to the door of the building to make his way to Maurice’s room and save him.  He penetrated but a short distance when, blinded and choking with the smoke, he rushed headlong down the stairs with a cry of despair that roused every man, woman, and child within reach of a human voice.  Out they came from their houses in every quarter of the village.  The shout of Fire!  Fire! was the chief aid lent by many of the young and old.  Some caught up pails and buckets:  the more thoughtful ones filling them; the hastier snatching them up empty, trusting to find water nearer the burning building.

Is the sick man moved?

This was the awful question first asked,—­for in the little village all knew that Maurice was about being transferred to the doctor’s house.  The attendant, white as death, pointed to the chamber where he had left him, and gasped out,

“He is there!”

A ladder!  A ladder! was the general cry, and men and boys rushed off in search of one.  But a single minute was an age now, and there was no ladder to be had without a delay of many minutes.  The sick man was going to be swallowed up in the flames before it could possibly arrive.  Some were going for a blanket or a coverlet, in the hope that the young man might have strength enough to leap from the window and be safely caught in it.  The attendant shook his head, and said faintly,