p smashed,
and suddenly poured a flare of blazing oil, a thud of white flame, into
the struggle.

That was the first thing the brickmaker saw.

He had heard the clatter of the doctor's approach and--though the
doctor's memory has nothing of this--wild shouting. He had got out of
bed hastily, and as he did so came the terrific smash, and up shot the
glare outside the rising blind. "It was brighter than day," he says. He
stood, blind cord in hand, and stared out of the window at a nightmare
transformation of the familiar road before him. The black figure of the
doctor with its whirling whip danced out against the flame. The horse
kicked indistinctly, half hidden by the blaze, with a rat at its throat.
In the obscurity against the churchyard wall, the eyes of a second
monster shone wickedly. Another--a mere dreadful blackness with red-lit
eyes and flesh-coloured hands--clutched unsteadily on the wall coping to
which it had leapt at the flash of the exploding lamp.

You know the keen face of a rat, those two sharp teeth, those pitiless
eyes. Seen magnified to near six times its linear dimensions, and still
more magnified by darkness and amazement and the leaping fancies of a
fitful blaze, it must have been an ill sight for the brickmaker--still
more than half asleep.

Then the doctor had grasped the opportunity, that momentary respite the
flare afforded, and was out of the brickmaker's sight below battering
the door with the butt of his whip....

The brickmaker would not let him in until he had got a light.

There are those who have blamed the man for that, but until I know my
own courage better, I hesitate to join their number.

The doctor yelled and hammered....

The brickmaker says he was weeping with terror when at last the door was
opened.

"Bolt," said the doctor, "bolt"--he could not say "bolt the door." He
tried to help, and was of no service. The brickmaker fastened the door,
and the doctor had to sit on the chair beside the clock for a space
before he could go upstairs....

"I don't know what they _are_!" he repeated several times. "I don't know
what they _are_"--with a high note on the "are."

The brickmaker would have got him whisky, but the doctor would not be
left alone with nothing but a flickering light just then.

It was long before the brickmaker could get him to go upstairs....

And when the fire was out the giant rats came back, took the dead horse,
dragged it across the churchyard into t