midnight sky.

So stood the Dean, and as the church broke thus into a very beacon
kindled upon a hill,--sank forward without a sign, his face against
the table, stricken.


You need to see a fire in a place such as Mariposa, a town still half
of wood, to know what fire means. In the city it is all different. To
the onlooker, at any rate, a fire is only a spectacle, nothing more.
Everything is arranged, organized, certain. It is only once perhaps
in a century that fire comes to a large city as it comes to the
little wooden town like Mariposa as a great Terror of the Night.

That, at any rate, is what it meant in Mariposa that night in April,
the night the Church of England Church burnt down. Had the fire
gained but a hundred feet, or less, it could have reached from the
driving shed behind the church to the backs of the wooden shops of
the Main Street, and once there not all the waters of Lake Wissanotti
could stay the course of its destruction. It was for that hundred
feet that they fought, the men of Mariposa, from the midnight call of
the bell till the slow coming of the day. They fought the fire, not
to save the church, for that was doomed from the first outbreak of
the flames, but to stop the spread of it and save the town. They
fought it at the windows, and at the blazing doors, and through the
yawning furnace of the open belfry; fought it, with the Mariposa
engine thumping and panting in the street, itself aglow with fire
like a servant demon fighting its own kind, with tall ladders
reaching to the very roof, and with hose that poured their streams of
tossing water foaming into the flames.