Reilly’s residence was a long, large, two-story house, deeply thatched; the kitchen, containing pantry, laundry, scullery, and all the usual appurtenances connected with it, was a continuation of the larger house, but it was a story lower, and also deeply thatched.  The out-offices ran in a long line behind the dwelling house, so that both ran parallel with each other, and stood pretty close besides, for the yard was a narrow one.  In the meantime, the night, though dry, was dark and stormy.  The wind howled through the adjoining trees like thunder, roared along the neighboring hills, and swept down in savage whirlwinds to the bottom of the lowest valleys.  The greater portion of the crowd who were standing outside the cordon we have spoken of fled home, as the awful gusts grew stronger and stronger, in order to prevent their own houses from being stripped or unroofed, so that very few remained to witness the rage of the conflagration at its full height.  The Irish peasantry entertain a superstition that whenever a strong storm of wind, without rain, arises, it has been occasioned by the necromantic spell of some guilty sorcerer, who, first having sold himself to the devil, afterwards raises him for some wicked purpose; and nothing but the sacrifice of a black dog or a black cock—­the one without a white hair, and the other without a white feather—­can prevent him from carrying away, body and soul, the individual who called him up, accompanied by such terrors.  In fact the night, independently of the terrible accessory of the fire, was indescribably awful.  Thatch portions of the ribs and roofs of houses were whirled along through the air; and the sweeping blast, in addition to its own howlings, was burdened with the loud screamings of women and children, and the stronger shoutings of men, as they attempted to make each other audible, amidst the roaring of the tempest.

This was terrible indeed; but on such a night, what must not the conflagration have been, fed by such pabulum—­as Sir Robert himself would have said—­as that on which it glutted its fiery and consuming appetite.  We have said that the offices and dwelling-house ran parallel with each other, and such was the fact.  What appeared singular, and not without the possibility of some dark supernatural causes, according to the impressions of the people, was, that the wind, on the night in question, started, as it were, along with the fire; but the truth is, it had been gamboling in its gigantic play before the fire commenced at all.  In the meantime, as we said, the whole premises presented one fiery mass of red and waving flames, that shot and drifted up, from time to time, towards the sky, with the rapidity, and more than the terror, of the aurora borealis.  As the conflagration proceeded, the high flames that arose from the mansion, and those that leaped up from the offices, several times met across the yard, and mingled, as if to exult in their fearful task of destruction,