' The
fire raged across the walls, in and around the sides and the
beautiful curving tops of the windows that for so many springs
and summers had framed spaces of green grass on which fitful
shadows had fallen, to be dreamed over by generations of students.
In the chapel, tremendous waves swelled and glowed, reaching
almost from floor to ceiling, as they erased the texts from the
walls, demolished the stained-glass windows, defaced, but did not
completely destroy the college motto graven over them, and, in
convulsive gusts swept from end to end of the chapel, pouring in
and out of the windows in brilliant light and color. Seen from
the campus below, the burning east end of the building loomed up
magnificent even in the havoc and desolation it was suffering."
At half past eight o'clock, four hours after the first alarm was
sounded, there stood on the hill above the lake, bare, roofless
walls and sky-filled arches as august as any medieval castle
of Europe. Like Thomas the Rhymer, they had spent the night
in fairyland, and waked a thousand years old. Romance already
whispered through their dismantled, endless aisles. King Arthur's
castle of Camelot was not more remote from to-day than College Hall
from the twentieth-century March morning.
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