Miss Glidden had been sitting up reading "Ivanhoe," and had paid no attention to the great fire, except to look out of the window a few minutes on the first alarm. Hearing this thundering noise at the door, she stepped to the head of the stairs, in a half-dazed condition, and saw ascending them, as she expressed it, "a grotesque creature, in tight clothes, wearing an enormous mediæval helmet, and bearing in his hand a gleaming battle-axe." She could only think him the ghost of a Templar, screamed, and fainted.
| "THIS MUST BE PUT IN A SAFE PLACE." |
The man who had gone in after Phaeton, passed him on the stairs, and soon emerged from the house, bearing the young lady in his arms. It was Jack-in-the-Box.
Phaeton came out a few minutes later, bringing her canary in its cage.
"This must be put in a safe place," said he to me; "Miss Glidden thinks the world of it. I'll run home with it, and come back again." And he ran off, just escaping arrest at the hands of a policeman who thought he was stealing the bird, but who was not able to run fast enough to catch him.
Meanwhile the firemen were preparing to extinguish the new fire. There was no water-supply near enough for a single engine to span the distance. Some of them had been left at the great fire, to continue pouring water upon it, while the chief engineer ordered four of them to take care of this one.
They formed two lines, Red Rover Three and Big Six taking water from the canal and sending it along to Cataract Eight and Rough-and-Ready Seven, who threw it upon the burning house.
As Phaeton, Jack-in-the-Box, Miss Glidden, and the canary emerged from the house, half a dozen men rushed in—some of them firemen, and some citizens who had volunteered their help. In a little while, one of them appeared at an upper window, having in his hands a large looking-glass with an elaborately carved frame. Without stopping to open the window, he dashed the mirror through sash, glass, and all, and as it struck the ground it was shivered into a thousand fragments.
Then another man appeared at the window with an armful of small framed pictures, and, taking them one at a time by the corner, "scaled" them out into the air.