the red tempest of fire. Now surging aloft, and streaking with its winding jets of flame the fiercely whirling clouds of smoke that marked its advance, and now dying away in hoarse murmurs, as if to gather strength for the new and more furious outburst that the next moment followed, it kept on its terrific march till it reached the central elevation, which embraced the most tangled, densely covered, and combustible part of the slash, and on which had been left standing an enormous dry pine, that towered so up high above the surrounding forest as to have long served as a landmark for the hunters and fishermen, in setting their courses through the woods or over the lake. Here the fiery billow, as if governed by the human tactics of a military assault, paused, parted, and swept by on either side, till it had inclosed the elevation; when suddenly it shot up from every side in an hundred converging tongues of flame, which, soon meeting and expanding into one, quickly enveloped the whole hill in one broad, unbroken robe of sheeted fire, encompassed and mounted the veteran pine, and around its colossal trunk formed a huge, whirling pyramid of mingling smoke and flame that rose to the mid-heavens, shedding, in place of the darkened sun, a lurid glare over the forest, and sending forth the stormy roar of a belching volcano. The next moment a shower of cinders and the burning fragments of twigs, bark, and boughs which had been carried high up by the force of the ascending currents, fell hot and hissing to the earth over every part of the adjoining fields, to and even far beyond the spot where Elwood and his wife were standing. "Good Heavens!" exclaimed Elwood, aroused from the mute amazement with which he and his more terrified companion had been beholding the scene, as soon as these indications of danger were thus brought to his very feet. "Good Heavens! this is more than I bargained for. See,--the fire is catching on the stumps all over the field!" "The house!" half-screamed Mrs. Elwood. "What is that rising from the shingles up there near the top of the roof?" "Smoke, as I am alive!" cried the other, in serious alarm, as he glanced up to the roof, where several slender threads of smoke were beginning to steal along the shingles. "Run, Alice, run with the pails for the brook, while I throw up the ladder against the gable. We must be lively, or within one hour we shall be as houseless as beggars." "O, where is Claud? where is Claud?" exclaimed the distressed wife and mother, as she flew to the house to do her husband's bidding. Yes, where was Claud? At the risk of the charge of purposely tantalizing the reader, we must break off here, to follow the young man just named, in the unexpected adventures which he also had experienced during that eventful day. But for this we will take a new chapter. CHAPTER VI.