You all know how an innocent-looking fire-cracker set Portland ablaze, but you can have little idea of the terror which that woeful Fourth of July night brought to our three little girls. When I think of it now, I fancy I see them speeding up and down that departed staircase, trying to help the men carry water to pour on the roof. The earnestness of their faces is very striking as Susy brandishes a pail, Dotty a glass pitcher, and Prudy a watering-pot, in the delusive hope that they are making themselves useful. After this, when the children have had a troubled sleep, and wake in the morning to find the house actually on fire, the horror is something always to be remembered. Flames are already bursting out of some of the lower windows. It is no longer of any use to pour water. There is no time to be lost. Mrs. Parlin hurries the children down stairs, and out of the house, under their grandmother's protection. They thread their dismal way up town, through smoke and flame, Susy shedding tears enough to put out a common coal fire. It is, indeed, a bitter thing to turn their backs upon that dear old home, and know for a certainty that they will never see it again! In the place where it stands there will soon be a black ruin! "The fire is lapping and licking," says Prudy, "like a cat eating cream." "I hope it has a good time eating our house up!" cried Dotty, in wrath. Susy groans. Dotty thinks they are going to be beggars in rags and jags. Prudy, always ready with her trap to catch a sunbeam, says that after all there are other little girls in the world worse off than they are. Susy thinks not. "O, children, you are young and can't realize it; but this is awful!" Dotty tries to be more wretched than ever, to satisfy her eldest sister's ideas of justice. She sends out from her throat a sound of agony, which resembles a howl. Prudy's chief consolation is in remembering, as she says, that "God knows we are afire." Prudy is always sure God will not let anything happen that is _too_ dreadful. She has observed that her mother is calm; and whatever mamma says and does always approves itself to this second daughter. But Susy can only wring her hands in hopeless despair. She has helped save the books, still she "expects they will burn up, somehow, on the road." Her pony has been trotting about through the night; his hair is singed, and she "presumes it will strike in and kill him." The world is, to Susy's view, one vast scene of lurid horrors. If she couldn't cry, she thinks she should certainly die. But this strange night came to an end. Dreadful things may and do happen in this world, but, as a general rule, they do not last a great while. The fire did its work, and then stopped. It was fearful while it raged, and it left a pitiful wreck; still, as Mrs. Parlin said, it was "not so bad but it might have been worse." "Nothing," she always declared, "ought to make us really unhappy except sin."