“Prayers from the women and imprecations from the men, and then a shell would light up the scene.” Mary grew tired. “Up on the housetop I was so weak and weary I sat down on something that looked like a black stool,” she wrote. A man shouted, “Get up, you foolish woman—your dress is on fire.” She stood. “And he put me out,” she wrote. “It was a chimney, and the sparks caught my clothes.” Another man and a woman came to help. “But my fire had been extinguished before it broke out into a regular blaze.”
