flies had caught fire and were hanging in blazing
streamers.  Fire rose from below, fire gleamed
from above, fire darted its quick tongues from
either side.  The theatre was on fire.  The
bajozzo had not been feigning, but was terribly
in earnest.

I shall never forget the scream that burst
from those four thousand people when the reality
broke upon them.  I had only an instant to
look, but in that instant I saw row after row of
white faces turn as by one impulse to the door.
Then, came a stamping rush as of a herd of
maddened animals.  Many tore forward without
a thought but of their own safety, others
snatched up their children, others dragged
forward their old mothers or fathers, or bore their
wives or sweethearts in their arms.  Then came
the grapple for life, the trampling suffocating
battle for existence that only served to hasten
on death.

In many things I am coward enough, but in
sudden danger I have always found myself cool
and collected.  Perhaps a sailor's frequent
hazards, and the constant thought of the
possibility of death, is a sort of training; perhaps
it is a constitutional quality. I know not how
it is.  I only state the fact. I saw immediately
that though for the moment safe, and far
from the full torrent of the struggle, my hopes
of escape were quite as desperate as the hopes
of those who were trampling each other to death
at the entrance below.  Unfortunately, one of the
great folding-doors opened inward.  In the first
rush it had been closed, and now the pressure
was so great it could not be moved one way
or other.

The flames were spreading rapidly, the smoke
rolled towards us in blinding clouds, and from
those clouds darted and leaped serpent tongues
of fire.  The flames seemed with cruel greediness
to spring from seat to seat.  The slips
were blazing, the orchestra was a seething pit
of fire.  The screams and groans on all sides
were heart-breaking.

I hesitated for a moment whether to remain
where I was and meet death, or to breast the
human whirlpool below.  At that moment a
surge of flame ran along the ledge of the next
box to me, blackening and blistering as it went.
The heat grew intense.  I determined to make
one struggle for my life.  I ran to the head of
the stairs and looked down.  There, the herd of
screaming shouting people fought with hands and
feet in a horrible tangle of life and death.

I gave myself up as lost, when a hand seized
my coat.  It was the old housekeeper, screaming
her entreaties to me to save her.  I told her
to cling to me and I would do what I could.
It gave me courage to think I was struggling
for some one besides myself.  She kneeled and
prayed to God for us both.

I had placed myself at the edge of the
crowd in order to husband my strength for a
last effort.  One thing I determined, and that
was that I would not save myself by treading
poor women and children under foot.  Rather
than that, I would let the fire burn me slowly,
or I would recommend my soul to God, throw
myself into the crater behind me, and so die
quickly.  One agonising thought alone shot
through my heart, and that was a thought for
the tender girl I had seen so innocent and happy
half an hour before.

Suddenly, as I stood there like a diver
hesitating before he plunges, a peasant, scorched
and burnt, dashed past me from the crowd that
had trampled upon him, and, staggering forward,
half-stifled with smoke, fell face downward dead
at my feet.  His axe, as usual with the peasants,
was thrust in his belt behind.  A thought of
self-preservation, surely sent straight from
Heaven, flashed through my brain. I stooped
and drew out the axe.

"Make way there, or I cut down the first
man who stops me!"  I cried out, in broken
Russian.

I half fought, half persuaded, a few to give
way, until I reached the bottom of the stairs,
and had the bare plank wall of the outer
enclosure of the theatre before me.

"I will save you all,"  I cried, "if you will
let me free my arm."

The old woman still clung to me, but as I
advanced to strike my first blow at the plank
partition that arose between life and death,
there came a rush which for a moment separated
us.  I had no time or room to turn, but next
moment I felt her grasp still firmer and closer.

One blow, and the splinters flew; a second
blow, a plank gave; a third blow, and the
blessed daylight poured in on us; a fourth blow,
and a chasm yawned, wide enough for the passage
of myself and my charge.  After us, hundreds
passed out rapidly.

I found myself among a crowd of shrieking
women, who were calling on an officer standing
in a barouche drawn by six horses, to save their
husbands, sons, brothers.  Suddenly a man
with a scorched beard, his eyes streaming with
tears, came and took from me the woman I had
saved.  I was so blinded with smoke and
fevered with excitement, that I had scarcely
given her a thought.  All I knew was, that I
had saved an old woman, and, by God's grace,
opened a door of escape for some hundreds of
otherwise doomed creatures.

When I looked round, I found the merchant
whom I had before seen (he was the scorched
and weeping man), shedding tears of joy over a
beautiful girl who had fainted.  The old woman
had been divided from me in the tumult.  The
merchant's daughter it was who had then clasped
me—it was her whom I had saved.  Beautiful
she looked as I bent over her and received her
father's blessings.

The tall officer was the emperor.  "My
children,"  he kept saying to the mob,  "I will
save all I can!  Bring that brave man to me."

I am not ashamed to repeat those words,
though I did not deserve them.

"Englishman," he said to me in French,
"the Russian nation owes you a debt of
gratitude; it is for me to repay it; come to me
tomorrow at the palace."