They dressed hurriedly, called up Napoleon, and went out at the front door, and on with the stream toward the fire. The street was crowded with people, the air thick with noises, and everywhere it was as light as day. They passed on under the lurid heavens, and reached a hotel which stood open. Two streams of people were on the stairs--one hurrying down, the other going up for a view of the fire. Our party followed the stream up the stairs and on to the roof. It was crowded with spectators, all greatly excited. Making their way to the front of the roof, our couple stood spellbound by a vision which once seen could never be forgotten. It was like a look into hell. The whole fire seemed below them, a surging, tempest-lashed ocean of flame, with mile-long billows, mile-high breakers and mile-deep shadows. All about the flaming ocean, except to the leeward, was a sea of faces, white and upturned, and rapt as with some unearthly vision. Stretching out for miles were housetops swarming with crowds, gazing appalled at the spectacle in which the fate of every man, woman and child of them was vitally involved. At times the gale, with a strong, steady sweep, would level the billows of fire, and bear the current northward with the majestic flow of a great river. Then the flames would heave and part as with earthquake throes, dash skyward in jets and spouts innumerable, and pile up to the north-east mountains of fire that seemed to touch the heavens. Clouds of smoke obscured at times the view of the streets below, without making inaudible the roll of wheels, the beat of hoofs, the tramp of human feet, the cry of human voices, the scream of the engines, the thunder of falling buildings, the maniacal shriek of the gale, the Niagara-like roar of the fire; and ever and anon, striking through all the tumult, the deep, solemn voice of the great court-house bell, and the one word it seemed to say to the trembling city--"Doomed! doomed! doomed." "We must go home," said Mrs. Lively in a lost, bewildered way. "Yes," assented the doctor: "there is no safety this side the river. All the engines in creation couldn't stop that fire. Why in God's name don't they pull down houses or explode them? Come!" But the lady continued to gaze in a fascinated way at the unearthly spectacle. It was all so wild, so awful, that the brain reeled. The doomed houses in the path of the fire seemed to her to be animate things--dumb, helpless, feeling creatures, that trembled and shrank as the flames reached out cruel fingers for them. She shook off the bewildered, dazed feeling, but it came again as the tempest of flame and smoke went racing to the north. Street and house and steeple and the vast crowds seemed sailing away on some swift crescent river to a great, vague, yawning blackness beyond.