The fire had gained the mastery over the great building, before my arrival, and the principal efforts of the firemen were directed to saving the piano factory, with its stock of kiln-dried lumber, of costly veneers, and of inflammable varnishes. From that repository of so many almost priceless volumes, so many absolutely priceless charts, and of that Key which should enable the possessor to avail himself of half a century’s work by another--great sheets of flame arose from beds of fire. Red sullen gusts, “fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,” bore on their hurtling wings the treasures of a lifetime--bright, upward-pouring golden torrents, wasting mind and matter at furious rate. Fierce though the heat, which seemed to crisp my skin even at the distance at which I was stationed, it was nothing to the hot welling passions which assailed my inner self and drove me to despair. That fury of a woman scorned, than which hell no greater hath indeed, was as nothing to a man so baffled in ambition, which “hath one heel nail’d in hell, Though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens.” Demoniac rage possessed my soul--I was frenzied to the verge of insanity, and as the crash of that roof-tree which had shielded the light of prophecy and covered my hopes, if but for so short a time, sent scintillations up and out, far and wide, I rushed from the excited scene, I knew not whither. * * * * * When I next recognized my surroundings, I found myself in a small, neat room, white-walled and curtained--and Estelle’s anxious face was bending over me. I had been ill a month, and my gaunt limbs and haggard features, which I insisted on seeing in a mirror, gave no reminiscence of my once plump face and rounded form. My voice, the mere ghost of a sound, was hardly the semblance of its former resonant self. At first I was not permitted to excite myself by too eager inquiry, but as I gained strength, those about me, who of course had known nothing about my intended collaboration with Brathwaite, set to work to ascertain something concerning the events of that September night in which I had been so swiftly snatched up to the seventh heaven of expectancy, and as suddenly dropped to earth again. There was nothing reassuring in the tidings of a month ago. The enthusiast, roused from slumber by the shrill cry of fire, sought to save his papers rather than his person; traversed passage after passage claimed by the invading flames; and bore treasure after treasure to the lower hall. But in penetrating to some distant stairway, which gave way under his daring footsteps, he inhaled flame, and although rescued by the bravery of the firemen, was borne from the seething, roaring furnace--only to die. So, then, the manuscript which the noble soul had entrusted to me, as an earnest of what was to come, was all that remained of a life of work, a fortune of expenditure.