For weeks previously the summer weather had been hot and dry. There was, for a wonder, a cessation of the coast showers. The fated morning was abnormal--sultry and breezeless. The vaporous sky became lurid, darksome--awful. More than one terrified spectator believed that the Last Day had come, and not altogether without reason. The whole colony of Victoria was on fire at the same time, from the western coast to the eastern range of the Australian Alps. Farms and stations were burning at Port Fairy and Portland. The wife and children of a shepherd on the Upper Plenty rivulet, eastward of Melbourne, were burned to death, nearly three hundred miles in another direction. Far out to sea passengers viewed with wonder and alarm a dense black cloud overhanging the coast-line like a pall, such as may have shrouded buried Pompeii when the volcano heaved its fiery flood. Far from land showers of ashes fell upon the decks of approaching ships. Though not without expectation of a larger bush-fire than usual, we were chiefly unprepared as the flame-wave rolled in over grass and forest from the north. The fire travelled fast on the preceding night, and the north-east wind rising to a gale towards mid-day, the march of the Destroyer waxed resistless and overpowering. Mr. Chamberlain told us afterwards that, feeling indisposed for exertion, and unaware of actual danger, he was lying down reading _Vanity Fair_. So enthralled was he by Becky Sharp's fascinations that he delayed going out to reconnoitre, though uneasily conscious that the smoke-clouds were thickening. He went at length on foot. Then he saw, to his astonishment, a wall of fire approaching the homestead with appalling rapidity. He turned and fled for his life, but had barely time to warn the station hands when the devouring element swept after. It was idle to resist in any ordinary method. The flames seemed to leap from the tree tops, as they scaled the trunks, then the higher branches, and were borne on loose fragments of bark far ahead of the line of fire. In a quarter of an hour each fence, building, and shed of a well-improved homestead was in flames. So great was the heat that after the first flight of the inmates from the dwelling-house, it was impossible to re-enter. Nothing of the contents was saved but a desk and a picture, while the household stood awestricken in a plot of garden vegetation, moistening their parched lips from time to time, suffocating with heat and smoke, and holding much doubt as to their ultimate safety. As they gazed around they could see the wild birds dropping dead from the forest trees, the kangaroos leaping past with singed and burning fur, while cattle, bellowing with fear and astonishment, dashed wildly to the river-bank, to plunge into the deeper pools.