inting 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 merchandise saved from the
falling warehouses into their freely offered shelter,--ladies were
walking to and fro, as if in their own halls and parlors, watching,
and questioning whomsoever came, and saying to each other hushed and
solemn or excited words,--when the whole city was but one great home
upon which had fallen a mighty agony and wonder that drove its
hearts to each other as the hearts of a household,--these two, Bel
Bree and little Miss Smalley, knew scarcely anything that was
defini