llowed by a second. This
cellar vault had been very strongly built, it was well lined with a
double row of bricks. And he had to pick out each brick of the second
layer as carefully as he had done with the first.

Meanwhile, in the roof above him, a rafter here and there was gaping
open, and fiery monsters, with blood-red eyes, were peeping down at him
and puffing clouds of blue smoke through the interstices. Thousands and
thousands of voices were bickering and chattering with each other, the
voices of the fire-spirit's little ones quarrelling with each other over
every little bit of rafter till their old mother, the evil flame, burst
roaring through a huge tough beam and frightened them into silence. And,
all the time, something was humming and crooning like a witch hushing
little children to sleep; and in the midst of the charred and
smouldering embers a buzzing and a fizzing was going on continually,
like the noise made by an imprisoned bee; and the pent-up blast howled
dismally down the chimney: Hoo! hoo! hoo!

"They are dancing and singing outside there!" murmured the headsman to
himself.

And now the second layer of bricks was also pierced, and up through the
rift, like a blast of wind, rushed the cold air of the cellar. Peter
Zudar bent low over the gap and filled his lungs with a good draught of
the life-giving air. He regularly intoxicated himself with it.

The gap was just big enough to enable him to squeeze through it.

First, however, with perilous curiosity, he cast a look round the room
he was about to leave. The principal girder of the ceiling was bent in
the middle from the intense heat, smoke was pouring into the room
through every crack and crevice, and filled it already to the height of
a man's stature; it was slowly descending in regular layers, lower and
lower, like a gradually falling cloud.

Little fluttering fiery threads were darting hither and thither, in the
grey cloud, like tiny flashing birds. The fiery spectre, peeping through
the rent in the roof, was already laughing a thunderous "ha! ha! ha!"
Peter Zudar laughed back at it.

"If thou dost laugh, I can laugh too, so the pair of us may laugh
together!"

Already he had crept half through the opening, whence he observed how
the beams were curving above his head, how they were bursting and
charring.

All at once he recollected something.

Hastily he scrambled out of the hole again. To walk upright in that room
was impossible, for