"Sir," said Neville, solemnly, as he rose to leave, "you are responsible to a higher tribunal than that at Washington. I have not learned to limit my sympathies and my instincts of humanity by a boundary line. You are a scholar, sir, and perhaps you remember the words of the Latin poet: 'Homo sum; humani nihil a me alien um puto.' I have the honour to wish you good day," and he bowed himself out. As he returned to the town he beheld soldiers going from house to house warning the people to turn out and remove their property, and proceeding, with inhuman alacrity, to set the buildings on fire. Then might be seen the women--most of the men were away with the troops--hastily gathering together their own and their children's clothing and a few treasured heirlooms, and with tears and bitter lamentation leaving their sheltering roof, going forth like the patriarch, not knowing whither they went The frost had set in early and severe. The snow lay deep upon the ground. Yet at thirty minutes' warning, of a hundred and fifty houses in Niagara, all were fired save one. There was scarce time to rescue the nursling babe, and the aged and infirm, from the doomed dwellings. The wife of Counsellor Dickson lay on a sick bed. Her husband was a prisoner on the American side of the river. The unfortunate lady "was carried, bed and all, and placed in the snow before her own door, where, shivering with cold, she beheld her house and all that was in it consumed to ashes."[Footnote: Jaines. Quoted by Auchinleck.] Of the valuable library, which had cost between five and six hundred pounds sterling, scarcely a book escaped. Late into the night burned the fires, reddening the midnight heavens with the lurid flames of comfortable homesteads, well- filled barns and is stacks of grain. Herds of affrighted cattle rushed wildly over the adjacent meadows, the kine lowing piteously with distended udders for the accustomed hands of their milkers at eventide. Of the hundred and fifty dwellings fired, only two or three escaped by accident, one of which still remains; and four hundred women and children were left to wander in the snow or seek the temporary shelter of some remote farm-house or Indian wigwam in the woods. Some wandered for days in the adjacent dismal "Black Swamp," feeding on frost-bitten cranberries, or on a casual rabbit or ground-hog.