m red
and sore. I do not think that in all my life I have spent such a
miserable time as during those days while we were trying to escape from
the region of the fire.

Of course, we did not know that there was any escape. Perhaps the whole
world had burned. But my father was sure that we should get out of it
some time or other if we only kept straight on. And keep on we did,
hardly ever leaving the water, but travelling on and on up the stream as
it got smaller and smaller, until finally there was no stream at all,
but only a spring bubbling out of the mountain-side. So we crossed over
the burnt ground until we came to the beginning of another stream on the
other side, and followed that down just as we had followed the first one
up. And perhaps the most dreadful thing all the time was the utter
silence of the woods. As a rule, both day and night, they were full of
the noises of other animals and birds, but now there was not a sound in
all the mountains. We seemed to be the only living things left.

The stream which we now followed was that on which the men whom we had
seen were camping, and presently we came to the place where they had
been. The chopped-log house was a pile of ashes and half-burnt wood.
About the ruins we found all sorts of curious things that were new to
us--among them, things which I now know were kettles and frying-pans;
and we came across lumps of their food, but it was all too much covered
with the black powder to be eatable. There we stayed for the best part
of a day, and then we went on without having seen a sign of man himself,
and wondering what had become of him.

Seven or eight days had passed since the fire, when, the day after we
passed the place where man had lived, we came to a beaver-dam across the
stream, and the beavers told us that, some hours before the fire reached
there, they had seen the men hurrying downstream, but they did not know
whether they had succeeded in escaping or not. And now other life began
to reappear. We met badgers and woodchucks and rats which had taken
refuge in their holes, and had at first been unable to force their way
out again through the mass of burnt stuff which covered the ground and
choked up their burrows. The air, too, began to be full of insects,
which had been safe underground or in the hearts of trees, and were now
hatching out. And then we met birds--woodpeckers first, and afterwards
jays, which were working back into the burnt district, and fro