The crash of a cottage roof tumbling in, and followed by a shower of sparks and small fragments of flaming wood, drowned the rest of the sentence. Matters were evidently bad enough, though not quite so bad as might have been augured from the first announcement of that herald of misfortune, Bugles the butler. The whole southern side of the long straggling street was more or less in flames; and to keep the fire from communicating itself to the houses on the opposite side of the road was a work which in itself taxed the strength of the whole adult male population to the utmost. The noise, the smoke, the falling sparks, and the occasional plumping down into the dust of the road of some half-consumed scrap of woodwork, made Lord Harrogate’s sisters, who were physically no braver than the average of their sex, shrink back aghast. ‘Here, Maud!’ cried her brother impatiently. ‘We must not—or I must not—be drones in the hive. You know most of these good people—Mrs Prosser, for instance.—Mrs Prosser, my sisters will stay with you while I go forward to bear a hand in getting the fire under.—Where’s my father? Ah, there he is, in the thick of the smoke!’ And there, sure enough, was dimly to be seen the well-known figure of the old Earl giving orders to such as were cool enough to hearken to them, whilst his frightened horse, held by a groom, stood at some distance. Darting through the clouds of suffocating vapour, which were dense enough to suggest the idea of a battle, Lord Harrogate reached the place where his father was standing. ‘I don’t see any fire-engines!’ exclaimed the young man, looking with a sort of dismay at the chain of buckets passed from hand to hand. ‘What, in the name of all that’s wonderful, are the people dreaming of?’ ‘We have sent to Pebworth for help,’ said the Earl, shaking his gray head; ‘but before any arrives, if the wind freshens the houses will be mere cinder-heaps. As for the parish engine, Stickles here has got the same story to tell that is only too common among us in England here.’