d by the heavy rain which had
now fallen incessantly for more than six hours. Burn the place over my
head? How?

While I was still casting about wildly in my mind to discover what
possible danger there could be of fire, one of the heavy stones
placed on the thatch to keep it from being torn up by high winds came
thundering down the chimney. It scattered the live embers on the hearth
all over the room. A richly-furnished place, with knickknacks and fine
muslin about it, would have been set on fire immediately. Even our
bare floor and rough furniture gave out a smell of burning at the first
shower of embers which the first stone scattered.

For an instant I stood quite horror-struck before this new proof of the
devilish ingenuity of the villains outside. But the dreadful danger
I was now in recalled me to my senses immediately. There was a large
canful of water in my bedroom, and I ran in at once to fetch it. Before
I could get back to the kitchen a second stone had been thrown down the
chimney, and the floor was smoldering in several places.

I had wit enough to let the smoldering go on for a moment or two more,
and to pour the whole of my canful of water over the fire before the
third stone came down the chimney. The live embers on the floor I easily
disposed of after that. The man on the roof must have heard the hissing
of the fire as I put it out, and have felt the change produced in the
air at the mouth of the chimney, for after the third stone had descended
no more followed it. As for either of the ruffians themselves dropping
down by the same road along which the stones had come, that was not to
be dreaded. The chimney, as I well knew by our experience in cleaning
it, was too narrow to give passage to any one above the size of a small
boy.

I looked upward as that comforting reflection crossed my mind--I looked
up, and saw, as plainly as I see the paper I am now writing on, the
point of a knife coming through the inside of the roof just over my
head. Our cottage had no upper story, and our rooms had no ceilings.
Slowly and wickedly the knife wriggled its way through the dry inside
thatch between the rafters. It stopped for a while, and there came a
sound of tearing. That, in its turn, stopped too; there was a great fall
of dry thatch on the floor; and I saw the heavy, hairy hand of Shifty
Dick, armed with the knife, come through after the fallen fragments. He
tapped at the rafters with the back of the knife, as