er death.

The night was cold and bleak, but full of stars. He had already mastered
the local topography, and he knew now exactly where all the bombs that
had been showered upon the place had fallen. Here was the corner of
blackened walls and roasted beams where three wounded horses had been
burnt alive in a barn, here the row of houses, some smashed, some almost
intact, where a mutilated child had screamed for two hours before she
could be rescued from the debris that had pinned her down, and taken to
the hospital. Everywhere by the dim light of the shaded street lamps he
could see the black holes and gaps of broken windows; sometimes
abundant, sometimes rare and exceptional, among otherwise uninjured
dwellings. Many of the victims he had visited in the little cottage
hospital where Aunt Wilshire had just died. She was the eleventh dead.
Altogether fifty-seven people had been killed or injured in this
brilliant German action. They were all civilians, and only twelve were
men.

Two Zeppelins had come in from over the sea, and had been fired at by an
anti-aircraft gun coming on an automobile from Ipswich. The first
intimation the people of the town had had of the raid was the report of
this gun. Many had run out to see what was happening. It was doubtful if
any one had really seen the Zeppelins, though every one testified to the
sound of their engines. Then suddenly the bombs had come streaming
down. Only six had made hits upon houses or people; the rest had fallen
ruinously and very close together on the local golf links, and at least
half had not exploded at all and did not seem to have been released to
explode.

A third at least of the injured people had been in bed when destruction
came upon them.

The story was like a page from some fantastic romance of Jules Verne's;
the peace of the little old town, the people going to bed, the quiet
streets, the quiet starry sky, and then for ten minutes an uproar of
guns and shells, a clatter of breaking glass, and then a fire here, a
fire there, a child's voice pitched high by pain and terror, scared
people going to and fro with lanterns, and the sky empty again, the
raiders gone....

Five minutes before, Aunt Wilshire had been sitting in the
boarding-house drawing-room playing a great stern "Patience," the
Emperor Patience ("Napoleon, my dear!--not that Potsdam creature") that
took hours to do. Five minutes later she was a thing of elemental terror
and agony, bleeding w