It was with no little sorrow that True recognized the coarse, rasping voice of the “doctor” when he came to see Ceph late one evening. Through a crack in their darkening stalls True espied the red-hot crow-bar, and the guttering tallow dip Silas had lighted and brought from the kitchen. Piebald Ceph had always been a mild-tempered horse, but scarce had the firing-iron touched his hock than he sent it--and the candle--flying into the hayloft, with an unexpected and well-directed kick. Before a horse could have whinneyed the place was in flames, the dry hay dropping in blazing bunches from overhead. A diabolic scene followed! Seconds passed like hours. True jerked his halter loose in terror, snapping the rope sharply; his heart almost ceased to beat, he was so frightened. Gipsey, locked in her stall, uttered a scream, as horses sometimes do when overcome with fear: old Ceph, crowding into the extreme corner of his stable, groaned pitifully. It was like a roaring furnace, the heat intense, the smoke suffocating. The shouting of the men was drowned in the confused mingling of horrible sounds as the flames leaped and licked the dry hay and caught the well-seasoned timbers. The horrid odor of burnt hair, a sudden silence in Ceph’s stall, told a heart-rending tale. The echoes of his mother’s cry had hardly died away when True felt a cool, wet cloth thrown over his eyes and held tightly; something struck him violently, and a voice spoke to him in such a tone of command that he forgot everything and, trembling like a leaf, allowed himself to be led into the outer air. Then, vaguely at first, he recognized Mistress Whitman’s tones, soothing now, and tender, albeit very shaky! “Come, my little pet, there’s naught to fear now!” And, trusting her, the colt followed tractably enough as she led him up two stone steps into the kitchen and took the bandage from his eyes. Then she hurried out, closing the door tight. An awful crash, a sudden greater roar, then ominous silence--the barn roof had fallen in! “Alas, my poor mother!” groaned True. The rattling of a tin pan at his side made him turn; to his everlasting joy he saw Gipsey, safe and sound as himself, shut up in the kitchen. Gipsey was an excitable mare, and began to prance about the place in an unseemly way, switching kettles and pewter pots off the table with her nervous tail and knocking them to the floor with a monstrous racket. Finally she pushed the cover from the swinging pot on the crane. Luckily the fire had been out some time and the delicious contents of the pot barely warm, else she would have had her nose burned. The odor of the mash proved very enticing and she was greedily, or maybe thoughtlessly, about to drink it all, when True pushed her one side, as if to remind her of her manners, and finished it himself--little dreaming, either one of them, it was the Whitman’s frugal supper.