For every time she shouted “Fire!”
They only answered “Little liar!”
And therefore when her aunt returned,
Matilda, and the house, were burned.

These lines come from Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary verse for children, in which he pairs jaunty rhythms with grimly comic morals. The speaker recounts the fate of Matilda, a girl who habitually cries “Fire!” for amusement, training the household to ignore her alarms. When a real fire breaks out during her aunt’s absence, no one believes her, and the poem ends with the darkly decisive consequence: Matilda and the house are burned. Belloc wrote such pieces in the early 20th century as satirical inversions of improving children’s literature, exaggerating punishment to expose both childish misbehavior and adult moralizing.

The stanza dramatizes the classic “cry wolf” logic: repeated false alarms destroy credibility, so truth arrives too late to be heeded. Belloc’s significance lies in tone as much as lesson—he delivers a moral in a sing-song rhyme while refusing sentimental rescue, making the ending both funny (in its bluntness) and unsettling. The poem also hints at social dynamics: communal trust is a fragile resource, and once squandered it cannot be instantly restored even in emergencies. The final couplet compresses cause and effect into a single, memorable moral shock.