The weatherboard at the end of Shale Street took to fire on Saturday evening, by an account no one present seems able to agree upon. The brigade was not called. By the time the smoke was seen from the bridge, those inside had carried what furniture they could onto the grass and, finding the night warm and the cause already lost, began to dance.
A neighbour, who asked not to be named and then named herself twice, said the house had been “going at it all weekend” and that the fire seemed, if anything, an improvement. No injuries were recorded. The dog was accounted for. A ring, reported stolen some months ago, was seen on a hand in the firelight and remarked upon for the way it still caught the light.
The house stands, half of it. Its occupants have declined the offer of other lodging, on the grounds that they are “so alive,” and that life, in any case, “can’t kick the soul out of” them. A phrase now heard often enough about town that this paper has taken it for a masthead.