This was only for an instant. Staggering backward before the cloud of smoke, with outstretched, groping hands, like one suddenly struck blind, an 'instinct,' or what you please to call it, struck her, and she tore off her flannel petticoat, wrapping it about her head and shoulders. Then, holding her hands over mouth and nose, she rushed desperately up the stairs. No one, unless he has been through such a smoke, can conceive of the trials she had to undergo in mounting those stairs. No one can fancy, except from the recollection of such an experience, how the fierce heat beat her back when she reached the upper hall. The walls were not yet fully on fire, but great tongues of flame curled along the ceiling, and hot blasts swept across her path. She knew his room. It was but a step to it, and the door opened easily. The nurse was fast asleep, so fast that poor Hannah's warning cry, as she stumbled in, hardly aroused her. On the bed lay Jason, so thin, so white, so corpse-like, she would hardly have known him. In the fierce strength of her despair it was no task to lift that emaciated body, but, ah! how to get out of the house with it? For when she turned she saw that the hall was now wholly on fire. But she did not hesitate. Wrapping him quickly and tenderly in a blanket taken from the bed, she rushed out into the flames. Meanwhile Peter Hopkins and his 'hired man' had been aroused by Hannah's first screams, and had hurriedly scrambled on a portion of their clothing and rushed out. They had been in time--running quickly across the field--to see Hannah disappear behind the house. Neither of them supposed for an instant that she had entered it. Trying the front door, and finding it fast, Peter uplifted his stout foot and kicked it crashing in, but he found it impossible to enter by the breach he had made. The front stairway was all in flames, and the fierce heat drove him hopelessly back. Then they ran around to the rear. By this time the entire upper portion of the building seemed to be one mass of fire and smote, and now they could hear shrill and terrible shrieks, evidently proceeding from the suddenly awakened inmates. They ran to the kitchen door and burst it in. As they did so there rushed towards them from the foot of the kitchen stairs some horrible, blazing, and unnatural shape, that came stumbling but swiftly forward. With it came smoke and flame and a horrible sound of stifled moans. At the approach of this strange and unsightly object they sprang back amazed, and it passed them headlong into the open air; passed them and _dropped apart_, as it were, into the stream before the door. For many years thereafter the slumbers of Farmer Hopkins were disturbed by visions of what he saw when the two two parts of that terrible apparition were taken from the water.