At last, however, the two engines from Pebworth came clattering into the street, and water being in that region of streams ready to hand, and the wind happily abating, the fire was fairly conquered, and all further danger at an end. There was no loss of life; but some were singed and many bruised; while thirty humble homes had been turned to heaps of smouldering ruin, and household gear and clothing, snatched from the flames, formed piles here and there in the wet road. Gradually the hospitality of this or that neighbour afforded temporary shelter to the crying children, the lamenting women, and the exhausted men; while a flying squadron of boys chased and led back captive the cows and pigs, the fowls and donkeys of those whose yards and sheds had been made desolate by the conflagration.
But what was Ethel to do? The old dame who served her had been readily received into the dwelling of a neighbour; and indeed nearly all of those so suddenly evicted had kindred, and all had friends to harbour them at this pinch. The young school-mistress looked forlorn indeed, as she stood alone in the midst of so many groups of voluble talkers.
‘You must come home with us, Miss Gray,’ said Lady Maud kindly; ‘must come up to High Tor House, I mean,’ she added, seeing that Ethel did not at first appear to comprehend her words, ‘and stay with us until something can be done. It is the least we can do for you, burned out of house and home in this dreadful way, as you have been.’
Lady Gladys heartily seconded the invitation; but Ethel still hesitated until the Earl drew near.
‘I have been telling Miss Gray here, papa, that we will take care of her at the House for a few days till she can look about her,’ said Lady Maud.
‘Quite right, my dear,’ answered the Earl with his fatherly smile; and thus the matter was settled.
CHINA AND MAJOLICA.
The love of china-ware still continues to be a mania amongst certain classes in this country. In the houses chiefly of the ‘upper ten,’ we see scattered in lavish profusion little Dresden figures, shepherds and shepherdesses, sweet, fresh, smiling, fantastic little loves, leaning on impossible crooks, or ogling us from under trees whose bowery greenery embodies all that is idyllic in crockery. Wonderful little old tea-cups, without handles, transparent as an egg-shell, with no colouring to speak of, faded, washed-out looking, are proudly pointed to as almost priceless. From these our great-great-grandmothers, in all the glories of hoops and furbelows, are said to have drunk their hyson and bohea in their great wainscoted and tapestried rooms, discoursing as they sipped the fragrant nectar, much as we their great-great-granddaughters do still, over our afternoon tea; for the world changes, but the human heart does not. All manner of vanities go the round; trivialities of dress or gossip; much tattling about the mote in our neighbour’s eye, and a careful avoiding, with commendable modesty, any reference even the most remote to the beam in our own. These pale transparent cups going their oft-repeated rounds may have sown in their day the seeds of many a pathetic commonplace tragedy or comedy, disseminating, as they circulated around the board, harmony and peace, or dissension and distrust.
Your true china collector has undoubtedly in him something of the antiquarian Dryasdust spirit, which loves to excavate and unearth the buried treasures of the past; in his case, however, it is gracefully blended with and overlaid by an instinctive fondness for the tender, lovely, fragile object of his regard. He knows, for he has often anxiously weighed it, how frail it is. Every time he looks at it he remembers the tumult of conflicting emotions with which, once secured, he packed it up with his own hands, and the fears for its ultimate safety which tempered the ecstatic pride of his triumph in the bargain which he had just struck.