The night was calm and clear, and the sea so still that we were able to keep the canoe at the same spot with but a touch of the paddles now and then. It was some time before we saw any considerable flames; indeed, we began to fear lest the wood of the raft were too damp to kindle properly, and Billy whispered in my ear, "Don't I wish we had some turps, or some of that pig fat we've got in our cellar. That would make something like a blaze." However, I told him he must be patient, and a little while after the flames burst from beneath the raft and licked the sides, and we heard a mighty crackling, the wood being wet, and at last a monstrous big flame and a thick column of smoke rose up into the sky, and I could hardly restrain Billy from shouting in his joy, he saying to me, in tones much above a whisper, that he had never seen a bigger bonfire, even on Guy Fawkes day, and he thought it must be something like the Fire of London. (I discovered afterwards, when I had time to remember it, that Billy did not in the least know what the Fire of London was, but knew only the phrase; and when I told him that a great part of the city was burnt down in that historical calamity, he asked me whether that was just another of my stories, like Robin Hood.) It was indeed a very fine sight in the blackness of the night, the glow lighting up the long slopes leading up from the beach, and being reflected magnificently in the sea. About half-an-hour, I should think, from the time when we first kindled the bonfire, we saw some of the seamen hasting down the hill, and the glow striking the barrels of the muskets which one or two carried, I deemed it expedient to withdraw a little farther from the beach, though in truth it was unlikely we could be seen. We lay to again, and observed the men draw near to the fire, some standing about it helplessly, one or two trying to scatter the fuel with the barrels of their muskets; but they could no nothing, the great heat preventing them from coming close enough, and besides, we saw Hoggett pull them away, and heard him cry out to them that they were fools, because they would only spoil the muskets and not put out the fire. And Ernulfus himself could not, I am sure, have cursed us more comprehensively than those seamen then did (you will find his curse in Mr. Sterne's ingenious book), and not merely did they curse us, but they added sundry strange extravagant threats of what they would do to us, some of these things being so horrible that Billy wanted to answer them back, only I prevented him, for besides being merely amused at these big words from men who were perfectly impotent to harm us, I thought that silence would work better for the further acting of my plans.