Charles Dickens: The Old Curiosity Shop

CHAPTER 67 (continued)

And there it lay alone. The sky was red with flame, and the water that bore it there had been tinged with the sullen light as it flowed along. The place the deserted carcass had left so recently, a living man, was now a blazing ruin. There was something of the glare upon its face. The hair, stirred by the damp breeze, played in a kind of mockery of death--such a mockery as the dead man himself would have delighted in when alive--about its head, and its dress fluttered idly in the night wind.