hese buildings lay
unheeded; for here where the flames had died, they had not destroyed
everything combustible, as they had seemed to do almost everywhere
else. On the west side of Shawmut Avenue, where the houses still stood
intact, a few men were to be seen; these were the state militiamen in
their fatigue uniforms, patrolling the ruins. Smith called Helen's
attention to them.

"Why are they there?" she asked.

"To watch the vultures gathering for the feast. See! There goes one
of them now--over there to the left."

Helen looked; skulking along in the shadow of a ruined wall was a
shabby, rough-looking man who stole swiftly out of sight behind a pile
of rubbish.

"One of the scavengers. They come almost automatically after every
great disaster--fire, flood, battle, or pestilence. Ghouls, you
understand, from heaven knows where. That man's great-grandfather
probably robbed the dead grenadiers of the Legion of Honor at Waterloo."

"Thieves?" said the girl, in horror.

"Worse than thieves. Vandals, body-snatchers, murderers, if it came to
that. The kind of man who'd cut the finger off a dying woman to get
her wedding ring. Unpleasant, isn't it? Well, the militia are under
orders to shoot them on sight, if caught in the act. But let's go a
little farther on; I think we can get a better view from farther north."

"Wait," said his companion. "I am not ready to go--yet."

Smith heeded her voice, and for another unnoted interval they stood
agaze upon their little eminence.

Far to the northward the scene of ruin stretched away. Almost as far
as the eye could reach was only the shadow, the terrible and disfigured
skeleton of what had been the city. Everywhere were smoldering piles
with occasional tongues of sullen, orange flame and their myriad
threads of smoke trailing upward in the still air like Indians' signal
fires. Here was a brick building, apparently hardly touched or harmed,
lifting its lonely height over its prostrate neighbors. Here a partly
burned structure, gutted but still erect, stood like a grim,
articulated skeleton, a gaunt scarecrow against the skyline.
Everywhere were mounds and hollows, hills and valleys, so that the
natural contour of the earth, unseen now these hundred years, once more
appeared. And over it all, everywhere that the fire had wholly burned
out, lay the heart-breaking beauty and whiteness of the snow, and of
the ashes under the snow.

"How terribly white it is