With a loud scream I dashed the old man from me, and flew to the door, which was open. I made my way through the stifling smoke that seemed almost to block up the passage, and sprang up stairs. The bed-room door was locked. With a violent effort I wrenched off the lock, and rushed into the room. All was darkness; but presently a huge tongue of flame swept through the doorway, and, running up the wall, expanded upon the ceiling; and then I saw a figure in white darting about the room with angular dodgings like a terrified bird in a cage. "Where is the child?" I exclaimed, in a voice of frenzy. Mrs. Steiner knew me, and ran towards me, clasping me with both arms. She shook her head wildly, and pointed she knew not where. "Here, Gibson,--here," cried the child, who had recognised my voice. I threw off my coat immediately, and, seizing the boy, wrapt him closely in it. "This way, madam,--this way; at once, for Heaven's sake!" and I dragged her to the landing. There was hell about me then! The flames, the smoke, the fire, the howlings; it was a living hell! But there was a shriek at that moment! Mrs. Steiner had left my side. Gracious Heavens! she had been precipitated below! A sickness came upon me then,--a sensation of being turned sharply round by some invisible power; and, with the child tightly clasped in my arms, I was thrown violently forward into the flames, that seemed howling and yearning to devour me. MASCALBRUNI. I have frequently observed that there are some people who haunt you in all parts of the world, and to whom you have a sort of secret antipathy, yet who, by an attraction in spite of repulsion, are continually crossing your path, as though they were sent as emissaries to link themselves with your destiny, or on the watch mysteriously to bring it about. One person in particular, whose name I do not even know, if he has one, I have met fifty times in as many different places, and we each say to ourselves, "'Tis he!--what, again!" So with a personage too well known at home and abroad, of whom, by a curious concatenation of circumstances, I am enabled to become the biographer.