ring coals and embers, giving scarcely more light than an
ordinary watch-fire.

But the peculiar interest of that scene did not die out with the fall of
the building: on the contrary, it was at that moment that it began to
assume proportions more easily recognized. For mingled with the crash of
the fall there seemed to be the sharp, shrill, terrible scream of a
human voice in agony; and the very instant after that scream was
repeated, so distinctly that it drove the blood from the cheeks of both
the soldiers at the gate.

"My God! did you hear that?" said Crawford.

"Didn't I!" answered Webster. "I wish I _hadn't_! Jack, do you know,
there must have been somebody in the house after all, burning to death;
and that scream, when the building fell, was the wind-up of a life!"

"It must have been so, and we have been standing here, doing nothing,
when aid might have been given!" said Crawford, in self-reproach, and
forgetting how little a man with one arm can do in the way of carrying
out people from a burning building. "Yet no--stop! No, Bob, that scream
was not the last of the person's life, for didn't you notice, we heard
it _twice_, and the last time after the house had fallen in? After that
house fell, no one inside of it ever screamed, and so--"

"And so," said Webster, interrupting, "there is somebody, _not_ in the
house, who screamed? That is what you mean, and by Jupiter, Jack, you
are right!"

"Now we _must_ look the other side of the house," said Crawford. "Some
poor creature, badly burned, may have crawled out from the flames and be
lying there in agony."

So there might have been, truly! And what a strange riddle is human
nature, even on that other side--mercy! We but a little while ago
considered the ease with which a man born with the warmest aspirations
for human good, might become eager for the destruction of life, when
that life belonged to a foeman: let the opposite spectacle be
considered, of a man who had just been plunging into the thick of a
hand-to-hand fight, estimating human heads as of no more value than
cocoa-nuts, and human lives as something to be taken without a shudder
or a pang of compunction,--a few minutes afterwards speaking of a "poor
creature" whose life might be threatened by fire, and speaking of that
"poor creature" with all the tenderness of a mother or a lover! And is
this inconsistent? No--it is consistent to the last degree. The brave
man is the pitiful man; and while he m