A truckle bed, a table, a chair, comprised the furniture; a soiled and ragged curtain at the diamond-paned window comprehended all the room possessed in the shape of drapery or hangings; the walls were bare, and washed with the odious salmon-hued distemper colour so prevalent in debtors’ prisons and apartments in poor neighbourhoods; the floor-boards with wide interstices between them, and large knot-holes here and there, where mice looked up, and unspareable halfpence sometimes rolled down, had not even a show of comfort in the way of a small bit of old stair-carpet by the bedside. All within and around bespoke poverty of the grimmest school. The girl, who lay upon the bed moaning in a disturbed slumber, with flushed cheeks, and pale and transparent lips, was no other than Lotte Clinton. Upon the night of the fire, when landed safely by the conductor of the fire-escape, she found herself in her thin night-dress, exposed to the cold night air, which struck chill to her unprotected bosom, while her naked tender feet were upon the hard stones, ankle deep in rushing water. The shock she had experienced on being awakened out of a deep slumber by the startling, horrifying cry of fire, the terror which all but paralysed her when, half-blinded and nearly suffocated, she discovered her room filled with smoke, the excitement which followed the rushing from her chamber, the roaring of the flames, the crackling and sputtering of the burning wood, the hoarse cries of the mob, the perilous descent to the ground, the sudden exposure to the eager gaze of a multitude of faces, red in the glaring, unnatural light, the whirl, the turmoil, mingled with a species of hysterical joy and gratefulness at her deliverance, created a combination of emotions beyond her physical powers of endurance. It is not wonderful that--affrighted, unknowing where to turn, whither to go, what to do, chilled to the marrow by the piercing coldness of the water rushing over her unprotected, delicate feet, utterly overwhelmed by what had happened, by the incidents surrounding her, and in which she was yet an actor--she should succumb; and find, that as some person hastily and roughly seized her about the waist, she should have a dim consciousness that the whole scene was fading from her as some expiring terrible vision, and that, when it disappeared from her eyes, she should be lifeless in the arms of the person who had caught hold of her.