ing of a text for the
funeral sermon. The first that occurred to him was this,--vaguely, of
course, in the background of consciousness:

"Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego came forth of the midst of the
fire."

The village undertaker was of naturally sober aspect and reflective
disposition. He had always been opposed to cremation, and here was a
funeral pile blazing before his eyes. He, too, had his human sympathies,
but in the distance his imagination pictured the final ceremony, and how
he himself should figure in a spectacle where the usual centre piece of
attraction would be wanting,--perhaps his own services uncalled for.

Blame him not, you whose garden-patch is not watered with the tears of
mourners. The string of self-interest answers with its chord to every
sound; it vibrates with the funeral-bell, it finds itself trembling to
the wail of the De Profundis. Not always,--not always; let us not be
cynical in our judgments, but common human nature, we may safely say,
is subject to those secondary vibrations under the most solemn and
soul-subduing influences.

It seems as if we were doing great wrong to the scene we are
contemplating in delaying it by the description of little circumstances
and individual thoughts and feelings. But linger as we may, we cannot
compress into a chapter--we could not crowd into a volume--all that
passed through the minds and stirred the emotions of the awe-struck
company which was gathered about the scene of danger and of terror. We
are dealing with an impossibility: consciousness is a surface; narrative
is a line.

Maurice had given himself up for lost. His breathing was becoming every
moment more difficult, and he felt that his strength could hold out but
a few minutes longer.

"Robert!" he called in faint accents. But the attendant was not there to
answer.

"Paolo! Paolo!" But the faithful servant, who would have given his
life for his master, had not yet reached the place where the crowd was
gathered.

"Oh, for a breath of air! Oh, for an arm to lift me from this bed!
Too late! Too late!" he gasped, with what might have seemed his dying
expiration.

"Not too late!" The soft voice reached his obscured consciousness as if
it had come down to him from heaven.

In a single instant he found himself rolled in a blanket and in the arms
of--a woman!

Out of the stifling chamber,--over the burning stairs,--close by the
tongues of fire that were lapping up all they could r