Will ye no wauken, Mansie Wauch ?--will ye no wauken ?--Murder, murder!--I say murder, murder, murder, murder!!!" "Who's murdering us ?" cried I, throwing my cowl back on the pillow, and rubbing my eyes in the hurry of a tremendous fright.--"Who's murdering us ?--where's the robbers ?--send for the town-officer!!" "O Mansie!--O Mansie!" said Nanse, in a kind of greeting tone, "I daursay ye've felled me--but no matter, now I've gotten ye roused.

Do ye no see the haill street in a bleeze of flames?
Bad is the best; we maun either be burned to death, or out of house and hall, without a rag to cover our nakedness.

Where's my son ?--where's my dear bairn Benjie ?" In a most awful consternation, I jumped at this out to the middle of the floor, hearing the causeway all in an uproar of voices; and seeing the flichtering of the flames glancing on the houses in the opposite side of the street, all the windows of which were filled with the heads of half- naked folks, in round-eared mutches or Kilmarnocks; their mouths open, and their eyes staring with fright; while the sound of the fire-engine, rattling through the streets like thunder, seemed like the dead-cart of the plague, come to hurry away the corpses of the deceased for interment in the kirk-yard.
Never such a spectacle was witnessed in this world of sin and sorrow since the creation of Adam.

I pulled up the window and looked out--and, lo and behold! the very next house to our own was all in a low from cellar to garret; the burning joists hissing and cracking like mad; and the very wind that blew along, as warm as if it had been out of the mouth of a baker's oven!! It was a most awful spectacle! more by token to me, who was likely to be intimately concerned with it; and beating my brow with my clenched nieve, like a distracted creature, I saw that the labour of my whole life was likely to go for nought, and me to be a ruined man; all the earnings of my industry being laid out on my stock in trade, and on the plenishing of our bit house.

The darkness of the latter days came over my spirit like a vision before the prophet Isaiah; and I could see nothing in the years to come but beggary and starvation; myself a fallen-back old man, with an out-at-the-elbows coat, a greasy hat, and a bald pow, hirpling over a staff, requeeshting an awmous--Nanse a broken-hearted beggar wife, torn down to tatters, and weeping like Rachel when she thought on better days--and poor wee Benjie going from door to door with a meal-pock on his back.
The thought first dung me stupid, and then drove me to desperation; and not even minding the dear wife of my bosom, that had fainted away as dead as a herring, I pulled on my trowsers like mad, and rushed out into the street, bareheaded and barefoot as the day that Lucky Bringthereout dragged me into the world.
The crowd saw in the twinkling of an eyeball that I was a desperate man, fierce as Sir William Wallace, and not to be withstood by gentle or semple.