“At ten minutes before five, on Tuesday, the tenth of January, the Pemberton Mill, all hands being at the time on duty, fell to the ground.”

So the record flashed over the telegraph wires, sprang into large type in the newspapers, passed from lip to lip, a nine days’ wonder, gave place to the successful candidate, and the muttering South, and was forgotten.

Who shall say what it was to the seven hundred and fifty souls who were buried in the ruins?  What to the eighty-eight who died that death of exquisite agony?  What to the wrecks of men and women who endure unto this day a life that is worse than death?  What to that architect and engineer who, when the fatal pillars were first delivered to them for inspection, had found one broken under their eyes, yet accepted the contract, and built with them a mill whose thin walls and wide, unsupported stretches might have tottered over massive columns and on flawless ore?

One that we love may go upon battle-ground, and we are ready for the worst:  we have said our good-bys; our hearts wait and pray:  it is his life, not his death, which is the surprise.  But that he should go out to his safe, daily, commonplace occupations, unnoticed and uncaressed,—­scolded a little, perhaps, because he leaves the door open, and tells us how cross we are this morning; and they bring him up the steps by and by, a mangled mass of death and horror,—­that is hard.

Old Martyn, working at Meg Match’s shoes,—­she was never to wear those shoes, poor Meg!—­heard, at ten minutes before five, what he thought to be the rumble of an earthquake under his very feet, and stood with bated breath, waiting for the crash.  As nothing further appeared to happen, he took his stick and limped out into the street.

A vast crowd surged through it from end to end.  Women with white lips were counting the mills,—­Pacific, Atlantic, Washington,—­Pemberton?  Where was Pemberton?

Where Pemberton had winked its many eyes last night, and hummed with its iron lips this noon, a cloud of dust, black, silent, horrible, puffed a hundred feet into the air.

Asenath opened her eyes after a time.  Beautiful green and purple lights had been dancing about her, but she had had no thoughts.  It occurred to her now that she must have been struck upon the head.  The church-clocks were striking eight.  A bonfire which had been built at, a distance, to light the citizens in the work of rescue, cast a little gleam in through the debris across her two hands, which lay clasped together at her side.  One of her fingers, she saw, was gone; it was the finger which held Dick’s little engagement ring.  The red beam lay across her forehead, and drops dripped from it upon her eyes.  Her feet, still tangled in the gearing which had tripped her, were buried beneath a pile of bricks.