herself in a mist of
words and tears. I suppose I was severe, for she shrinks from me,
and clings to Avice, who has stood her friend in many a storm
before, and, as Jane indignantly tells me, persists in believing
that she is really sorry and wishes to be good. She is very
attentive and obliging, and my dear mother, who is in happy
ignorance of all this uproar, really likes her the best of all the
girls.

21.--We have had a great alarm. Last evening we went to the parish
church; Horace Druce had been asked to preach, and the rain, which
had fallen all the morning, cleared off just in time for the walk.
Emily, Margaret, two of her children, and I sat in the gallery, and
Avice and Isa in the free seats below. Avice had been kept at home
by the rain in the morning, but had begged leave to go later.
Darkness came on just as the first hymn was given out, and the
verger went round with his long wand lighting the gas. In the
gallery we saw plainly how, at the east end, something went wrong
with his match, one which he thought had failed, and threw aside.
It fell on a strip of straw matting in the aisle, which, being very
dry, caught fire and blazed up for a few seconds before it was
trampled out. Some foolish person, however, set the cry of 'Fire!'
going, and you know what that is in a crowded church. The vicar, in
his high old-fashioned desk with a back to it, could not see.
Horace in a chair, in the narrow, shallow sanctuary, did see that it
was nothing, but between the cries of 'Fire!' and the dying peal of
the organ, could not make his voice heard. All he could do was to
get to the rear of the crowd, together with the other few who had
seen the real state of things, and turn back all those whom they
could, getting them out through the vestry. But the main body were
quite out of their reach, and everybody tried to rush scrambling
into the narrow centre aisle, choking up the door, which was a
complicated trap meant to keep out draughts. We in the gallery
tried vainly to assure them that the only danger was in the crowd,
and the clergyman in his desk, sure that was the chief peril, at any
rate, went on waving and calling to them to wait; but the cries and
shrieks drowned everything, and there was a most terrible time, as
some 600 people jammed themselves in that narrow space, fighting,
struggling, fainting.

You may suppose how we watched our girls. They had let themselves
be thrust up to the end of the seat by