"Hold your tongue!" interrupted my father angrily. "The man who said that was King Solomon--it's easy enough for _him_ to say it: only let some of our sort try it! I wouldn't be sure of myself; if it happened to me like little Maxel, I should just lose all heart--I'd just turn idle and good for nothing. Why, if a man puts a match to a thatched roof he's put in prison, and quite right too--he doesn't deserve anything better. But when Someone throws fire down out of Heaven on a brand-new house that a poor, plucky working-man has built----" He stopped himself. We were now upon the height, and in front of us blazed the homestead of little Maxel. The house was just falling in. Several people were there with axes and pails, but there was nothing to be done but just stand and look on as the last charred bits tumbled into ruins. The fire wasn't raging, it didn't roar nor crackle, it didn't flicker wildly in the air: the whole house was just one flame rising, hot and steady, towards the Heaven whence it had come. A little way off from the conflagration lay the stone-heap where Maxel had carried the stones from the Sour Meadow. Thereon he was now sitting, the little brown, pock-marked man, and looking at the furnace, the heat of which was streaming towards him. He was half clad, had thrown his black Sunday coat, the only thing he had rescued, over him. The neighbours were holding a little aloof. My father greatly desired to utter a word of sympathy and comfort, but somehow he too didn't venture to go near him. Maxel went on sitting there in a way that made us think every moment, now, _now_ he would leap up and utter some fearful curse against Heaven, and then throw himself into the flames! And at last, when the fire was only licking the ground and the bare wall of the hearth was staring out of the ashes, Maxel got up. He walked over to the glowing mass, picked up an ember, and lighted his pipe with it. I was still very small at that time and didn't think much. But this I remember: when I saw little Maxel in that dawn-twilight standing before the burnt ruin of his home, sucking the blue smoke from his pipe and blowing it away from him, my heart grew suddenly hot within me. As if I felt how mighty man is, how much greater than his fate, and how there was no finer scorning of it than calmly blowing tobacco-smoke in its face. And when the pipe was well alight, he sat down again on the stone-heap and gazed away into the distance. You would like to know what he was thinking? So should I.