eached and rescued
immediately it was all over with him.

His past life had flashed before him. Then all at once rose the thought
of his future,--of all its possibilities, of the vague hopes which he
had cherished of late that his mysterious doom would be lifted from him.
There was something, then, to be lived for, something! There was a new
life, it might be, in store for him, and such a new life! He thought of
all he was losing. Oh, could he but have lived to know the meaning of
love! And the passionate desire of life came over him,--not the dread of
death, but the longing for what the future might yet have of happiness
for him.

All this took place in the course of a very few moments. Dreams and
visions have little to do with measured time, and ten minutes, possibly
fifteen or twenty, were all that had passed since the beginning of those
nightmare terrors which were evidently suggested by the suffocating air
he was breathing.

What had happened? In the confusion of moving books and other articles
to the doctor's house, doors and windows had been forgotten. Among the
rest a window opening into the cellar, where some old furniture had
been left by a former occupant, had been left unclosed. One of the lazy
natives, who had lounged by the house smoking a bad cigar, had thrown
the burning stump in at this open window. He had no particular intention
of doing mischief, but he had that indifference to consequences which is
the next step above the inclination to crime. The burning stump happened
to fall among the straw of an old mattress which had been ripped open.
The smoker went his way without looking behind him, and it so chanced
that no other person passed the house for some time. Presently the straw
was in a blaze, and from this the fire extended to the furniture, to the
stairway leading up from the cellar, and was working its way along the
entry under the stairs leading up to the apartment where Maurice was
lying.

The blaze was fierce and swift, as it could not help being with such a
mass of combustibles,--loose straw from the mattress, dry old furniture,
and old warped floors which had been parching and shrinking for a score
or two of years. The whole house was, in the common language of the
newspaper reports, "a perfect tinder-box," and would probably be a heap
of ashes in half an hour. And there was this unfortunate deserted sick
man lying between life and death, beyond all help unless some unexpected
assistan