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There was no wind to blow the flame; but it was a clear frost; and soon fiery tongues shot out of three garret-windows into the night, and lurid gleams burnished four more, and the old house was burning merrily overhead, and ringing with hilarity on the first floor. But the neighbours saw, pointed, wondered, comprehended, shouted, rang, knocked, and surged round the iron gate.
You can see the washing hung out to dry on poles fastened to the garret-windows, or a tiny garden baking in the sun between the roof of one house and the ground-floor of another, with its parched leeks drooping their leaves over the grey soil; but the other side of the rock, the side that faces the ocean, is barren and deserted, and so steep that the shrubs that grow there have a hard time to remain where they are and look as if they were about to topple over every minute.
I walked with the utmost circumspection, to avoid treading on any stragglers who might remain in the streets; although the orders were very strict, that all people should keep in their houses at their own peril. The garret-windows and tops of houses were so crowded with spectators, that I thought in all my travels I had not seen a more populous place.
Above this straight line of walls, broken here and there by a tower or the pointed ogive of a door, rise the roofs of the houses with their open garret-windows, their gyrating weather-cocks, and their red chimneys from which issue spirals of bluish smoke that vanishes in the air.
The guests lolled over the galleries, which answered to our modern dress-circle; the critical mob clustered in the yard, instead of the pit; and the groups gazing from the garret-windows were no bad representatives of the gods of the shilling gallery.
Presently both nodded graciously, as if, understanding the cause of our intrusion on their aerial privacy, they wished to present us with the compliment of their welcome. The manners among these garret-windows, we murmured, were really uncommonly good. "Bonjour, mesdames!" It was the third time the woman had passed, and we were still at the window. Her husband left his seam to join her.
In one of those quaint antique towers of Normandy, Coutances, it was first fully developed; and it is curious to see how in this instance its roof-origin was still remembered: for it has tall, gabled garret-windows rising from its base, connected by rude cross-bars to the slope of the spire; and it has a kind of scaly mail, Ruskin says, which is nothing more than the copying in stone of the common wooden shingles of the house-roof.
Gables, housetops, garret-windows, wilderness upon wilderness. Smoke and noise enough for all the world at once. After the first glance, there were slight features in the midst of this crowd of objects, which sprung out from the mass without any reason, as it were, and took hold of the attention whether the spectator would or no.
The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed through the dusty garret-windows while I burrowed among these venerable books in search of any living thought which should burn like a coal of fire or glow like an inextinguishable gem beneath the dead trumpery that had long hidden it.
From the garret-windows of our house, which was half a mile distant from Laura's, I could see the windows of the room where she was lying. Three tall poplar-trees intervened in the landscape. I thought they stood motionless so that they might not intercept my view while I watched the house of death. One morning I saw that the blinds had been thrown back and the windows opened.
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