“Was that the time,” interrupted Rollo, “when you had your hen-coop in a stump?”
“Why? did I ever tell you about that?” asked Dorothy.
“Yes,” replied Rollo, “you told me about your hen’s laying her eggs in an old hollow stump; and then your brother made a coop there, for the chickens.”
“Yes,” rejoined Dorothy, “that was at the same time. The next morning, I saw the smoke coming up again. It was not so thick as it had been the day before, when the fire first began to burn; but it seemed to spread over a larger space.”
“Had the fire got into the woods?” asked Rollo.
“Yes,” replied Dorothy. “My father told us, when he got home that day to dinner, that John Williams had let his fire get away from him, and that it had got into a fine growth of sugar maples, and was making sad work.
“My mother asked him if there was not any danger that it would get over to our land; but my father said no, not unless the wind should come in strong from the northward. But he said he thought there would be a shower that afternoon, and that would put it out.”
“And was there a shower?” asked Rollo.
“Yes,” replied Dorothy; “only the cloud brought more wind than rain, and so it fanned up the fire more than it extinguished it. The rain, in fact, only sprinkled the tops of the trees, leaving all the dry logs, stumps, leaves, and branches, which lay about upon the ground, as dry as ever. After the shower, there was a good fresh breeze all the evening; and about nine o’clock that evening, when we went to bed, the whole sky in that quarter was of a burning red, as if the heavens were on fire.”
“I should have thought you would have been afraid to go to bed,” said Rollo.