n as a picture shuttered by light, great
trees were split and broken, the woods fired, the gravel driven up in a
shower of pelting hail. I have seen storms in my life a-many, but never
one so loud and so angry as the storm of that ebbing sleep-time. There
were moments when a whirlwind of terrible sounds seemed to envelop us,
and the very heavens might have been rolling asunder. We said that the
bungalow could not stand, and we were right.

Now, this was a bad prophecy; but the fulfilment came more swiftly and
more surely than any of us had looked for. Indeed, Dolly Venn was
scarce upon his feet, and the sleep hardly out of Seth Barker's eyes,
when the room in which we stood was all filled by a scathing flame of
crimson light, and, a whirlwind of fire sweeping about us, it seemed to
wither and burn everything in its path and to scorch our very limbs as
it passed them by. To this there succeeded an overpowering stench of
sulphur, and ripping sounds as of wood bursting in splinters, and beams
falling, and the crackling of timber burning. Not a man among us, I
make sure, but knew full well the meaning of those signals or what they
called him to do. The bungalow was struck; life lay in the fog without,
in the death-fog we had twice escaped.

"She's burning--she's burning, by----!" cried Seth Barker, running
wildly for the door; and to his voice was added that of Duncan Gray,
who roared:

"My lead, my lead--stand back, for your lives!"

He threw a muffler round his neck and ran out from the stricken
bungalow. The whole westward wing of the house was now alight. Great
clouds of crimson flame wrestled with the looming fog above us; they
illumined all the garden about as with the light of ten thousand fiery
lamps. Suffocating smoke, burning breezes, floating sparks, leaping
tongues of flame drove us on. Cries you heard, one naming the heights
for a haven, another clamouring for the beach, one answering with an
oath, another, it may be, with a prayer; but no man keeping his wits or
shaping a true course. What would have happened but for the holding fog
and the sulphurous air we breathed, I make no pretence to say; but
Nature stopped us at last, and, panting and exhausted, we came to a
halt in the woods, and asked each other in the name of reason what we
should do next.

"The sea!" cries Peter Bligh, forgetting his courage (a rare thing for
him to do); "show me the sea or I'm a dead man!"

To whom Seth Barker answers:

"I