And with that a jet of light leapt from under the door-sill across the narrow pavement, almost between my legs: and I pitched headlong, with a shattered foot.
Doubtless I fainted with the pain: for it could not have been--as it seemed--only a minute later that I opened my eyes to find the square crowded and bright with the glare of two burning houses.

A herd of bellowing oxen came charging past the gutter where I lay, pricked on by a score of redcoats yelling in sheer drunkenness as they flourished their bayonets.

Two or three of them wore monks' robes flung over their uniforms, and danced idiotically, holding their skirts wide.

I supposed it had been raining, for a flood ran through the gutter and over my broken ankle.

In the light of the conflagration it showed pitch black, and by and by I knew it for wine flowing down from a whole cellarful of casks which a score of madmen were broaching as they dragged them forth from a house on the upper side of the square.