you? What a 'ero! Did you save one of them
boys?" squeaked Miss Persnips to Will's companion.

The minister's face was not very clean after his fight with the sooty
enemy, but as Will thought, "Love sees through all disguises."

"Yes, here I am, and if some of you good people will carry these boys
home, the rest of us will soak down those tenement houses opposite the
mill and see if we can't save them."

"The dear man! So disinterested, and before he had got his face washed,"
said Miss Persnips, pressing nearer to gain a better look at the object of
her admiration.

"Miss Persnips, excuse me," said the foreman of the "Torrent," the great
rival of the "Cataract," "but unless you withdraw, we shall be obliged to
wash you out of the way with the hose. Play away, Three!" he roared.

"O, massy!" screamed the shop-keeper, retiring to a safe place.

Will Somers went back to his place at the brakes of the "Cataract." As he
passed the door of the mill he looked into the entry, "What a blaze!" he
said.

It was not surprising that the flames had swept forward with such
rapidity. Up those old wooden stairs drying for years, greasy with the oil
drippings of the mill, the fire leaped and flew even rather than leaped.
The flames were reaching out like long, forked arms, vainly clutching
after the two boys that had been snatched away. The building was now the
plaything of the flames. Through it and over it, now climbing to the
highest point of the old-fashioned roof, then searching down into the
cellar, scorching, raging, roaring every-where, went the fire. In places
unexpected the flames would show themselves, looking out like the faces of
firefiends. Then they would retire a moment, only to come again and burst
out with a fury that nothing could resist, a fury that raged and rioted
till beams, rafters, flooring, and stair-ways were a black, ashy heap,
sputtering and hissing toward the sky--a snake heap full of hot fangs.

"I wonder how that fire started," was a frequent exclamation. "Don't
know," said every body save one poor, old tobacco-ridden man who confessed
that he had been smoking in the waste room, the place where the fire
started.

"When you see a man shoving a lighted pipe into sich a place." said Simes
Badger to the gossippy circle at Silas Trefethen's store that night, "send
in a bucket of water after him."

"What for? to put out the fire, or to wash him?" asked a hearer.

"Both," said Simes, "one to protect