They turned up the edges of the carpet, and kicked them over the tray.

This cut off the column of fire, and it disappeared and there was nothing left but smoke and a dreadful smell of lamps that have been turned too low.
All hands now rushed to the rescue, and the paraffin fire was only a bundle of trampled carpet, when suddenly a sharp crack beneath their feet made the amateur firemen start back.

Another crack--the carpet moved as if it had had a cat wrapped in it; the Jack-in-the-box had at last allowed itself to be lighted, and it was going off with desperate violence inside the carpet.
Robert, with the air of one doing the only possible thing, rushed to the window and opened it.

Anthea screamed, Jane burst into tears, and Cyril turned the table wrong way up on top of the carpet heap.

But the firework went on, banging and bursting and spluttering even underneath the table.
Next moment mother rushed in, attracted by the howls of Anthea, and in a few moments the firework desisted and there was a dead silence, and the children stood looking at each other's black faces, and, out of the corners of their eyes, at mother's white one.
The fact that the nursery carpet was ruined occasioned but little surprise, nor was any one really astonished that bed should prove the immediate end of the adventure.