Miss Smalley’s voice sounded at the door.

“It’s awful!” she whispered, through the keyhole, in a ghostly way.  “I thought you ought to know.  The cinders are flying everywhere.  I heard an engine come up from the railroad.  People are running along the streets, and teams are going, and everything,—­the other way!  They’re blowing up houses!  There, don’t you hear that?”

It was another sullen, heavy roar.

Bel sprang out of bed; hurried into her garments; opened the door to Miss Smalley.  They went and stood together in the entry-window.

“All Kingman’s carriages are out; sick horses and all; they’ve trundled wheelbarrow loads of things down to the stable.  There’s a heap of furniture dumped down in the middle of the place.  Women are going up Tremont Street with bundles and little children.  Where do you s’pose it’s got to?”

“See there!” said Bel, pointing across the square to the great, dark, public building.  High up, in one of the windows, a gas-light glimmered.  Two men were visible in the otherwise deserted place.  They were putting up a step-ladder.

“Do you suppose they are there nights,—­other nights?” Bel asked Miss Smalley.

“No.  They’re after books and things.  They’re going to pack up.”

“The fire can’t be coming here!”

Bel opened the window carefully, as she spoke.  A man was standing in the livery-stable door.  A hack came rapidly down, and the driver called out something as he jumped off.

“Where?” they heard the hostler ask.

“Most up to Temple Place.”

“Do they mean the fire?  They can’t!”

They did; but they were, as we know, somewhat mistaken.  Yet that great, surf-like flame, rushing up and on, was rioting at the very head of Summer Street, and plunging down Washington.  Trinity Church was already a blazing wreck.

“Has it come up Summer Street, or how?” asked Bel, helplessly, of helpless Miss Smalley.  “Do you suppose Fillmer & Bylles is burnt?”

“I must ask somebody!”

These women, with no man belonging to them to come and give them news,—­restrained by force of habit from what would have been at another time strange to do, and not knowing even yet the utter exceptionality of this time,—­while down among the hissing engines and before the face of the conflagration stood girls in delicate dress under evening wraps, come from gay visits with brothers and friends, and drawn irresistibly by the grand, awful magnetism of the spectacle,—­while up on the aristocratic avenues, along Arlington Street, whose windows flashed like jewels in the far-shining flames, where the wonderful bronze Washington sat majestic and still against that sky of stormy fire as he sits in every change and beautiful surprise of whatever sky of cloud or color may stretch about him,—­on Commonwealth Avenue, where splendid mansions stood with doors wide open, and drays unloading