OUR SAN FRANCISCO.

Evening Star, Issue 12882, 3 August 1906, Page 3

OUR SAN FRANCISCO.

' [Bt* James HorrEß.]

At midnight I was at the Grand Opera&OUSG, where the Conned Company was BiYing '.Carmen.' I still can see Caruso Striking open the gates of the arena with ms long Catalan. I see him stab, I hear Premstadt's scream,' Caruso's wail of remorse, glutted passion and remorse' commingled ; I see his magnificent crawling movement to her as the curtain comes down. I see myself walking back slowly to my paper,, the 'Call,' a few steps away, and lam faying to myself: " Surely, what I hare felt to-night is the summit of human emotion." And now, when I think of that, I almost laugh. After turning in my copy, I went up Post street to my room in the Neptune Hotel, six blocks away. It was two o'clock in the morning/ and that is ban Francisco's fairest hour. The blustering sea breeze has ceased at that time; from the land comes a breath of air already dawn scented. From the slope I was climbing I could see the dark loom of the bis buildings below, the bay beyond with the red and green lights and the long silhouettes of ships at anchor, and still farther the familiar, hc'arthlike glow of the mainland towns. The night struck me as particularly peaceful. As I passed a livery-stable on Post street between Powell and Mason streets a horse screamed with a sudden, shrill err. I asked a stableman lolling in the darkened doorway what was the matter. " Restless to-night; don't know why," he answered. u u ' it ' l my llead P okef l in> I beard the thunder of a score of hoofs crashing in tattoo against the stalls. I went up to my room. "Fine night," said the elevator boy. "Beautiful," I answered. 1 went to" bed at about three oVlock. I slept, but with a hot, restless slumber. I dreamed. I heard a scream, then another. It was the scream of Caruso before Carmen's prostrate form and the strident cry of the horse in the stable. They mingled, rose interwoven in a fiendish crescendo—and then I awoke to the city's destruction.

Bight away it was incredible—the violence of the quake. It started Avith a directness, a savage determination thatleft no doubt of its purpose. It pounced upon the earth as some sidereal bulldog, with a rattle of hungry eagerness. The earth Avas a rat, shaken in the grinding teeth—shaken, shaken, shaken, with periods of slight weariness folWed by new bursts of vicious rage. As far as I can remember, my impressions were as follow:—First, for a feAv seconds a feeling of incredulity, capped immediately Avith, one of finality—of incredulity at the violence of the vibrations. " It's incredible, incredible "—I think I said it aloud. Then the feeling of finality. "It's the end—St. Pierro, Samoa, Vesuvius, Formosa, San Francisco—this is death." 'Simultaneously with that, a picture of the city swaying beneath the curt of a tidal wave foaming ho the sky._ Then incredulity again at the length of it, at the sullen violence of it. '" It's incredible—vertical and rotary—look at me in my bed—like a fish in a "fryingpan." This last figure pleased me. "'just like a fish in a frying-pan." I repeated. Then an impulse to get out of the hide-ously-grinding walls, mastered immediately, solely from a repugnance, as I remember it, to making a show of myself. " No, ii I die, I die in bed, not with my tegs bare to the skies." Incredulity again at the mere length of the thing, the fearful stubbornness of it. Then curiosity—- " I must see it.'' I got up and walked to the window. I started to open it, but the pane obligingly fell outward and I poked my head out, the floor like a geyser beneath my feet. Then I heard the roar of the bricks coming down in cataracts and the groaning of twisted girders all over the city; and at ihe same time I saw the moon, a calm, pale crescent in the green sky of dawn. Beoav it the skeleton frame of an unfinished iky-scraper was SAvaying from side to side ivith a swing as exaggerated and absurd ;. as that of a pahi in a stage tempest. | Just then the quake, Avith a sound 'as ' >|f a snarl, rose to its climax of rage, and She back wall of inv building for three .- etofeys above me fell. I saw the mass "puss across my vision swift ns a shadow-. It struck some little wooden houses in the alley below. I saw them crash in like emptied eggs and the bricks pass through the roof as through tissue paper. The vibrations ceased, and I began to dress. Then I noted the great silence. Throughout the long quaking, in this great house full of people I had" not heard a cry, not a sound, not a sob. not a whisper. And now, when the roar of crumbling buildings was over and only a brick was falling here and there like the trickle ; of a spent rain, this silence continued, and i it was an awful thing. But now in the alley someone began to groan. It was a Avoman's groan, soft and low. I Avent doAvn the stairs and into flic streets, and they were full of people, halfclad, dishevelled, but silent, absolutely silent, as if suddenly they had become speechless idiots. I went into the little alley at the back of the building, but if was deserted and the crushed houses seemed empty. I wont down Post street toward the centre of town, and in the morning's garish light I saw many men and women with grey faces, but none spoke. All 'of them, they had s singular hurt expression—not one of physical pain, but rather one of injured sensibilities, as if seme trusted friend, say, had suddenly wronged them, or as if someone had said something rude to them. As for me, I felt a strange elation. I was immensely {iroud of myself. I had gone through that lideous minute and a-quarter with full command over myself, and now f was calm, absolutely calm. T throw my chest nut and looked with amazement upon my dazed co-citizens. And yet, within a few days after I saw again a friend who had met me just at that, time, he told me that I had been so excited I couldn't talk, that my arms trembled ns I gesticulated, and that my eyes were an inch out of their sockets. As I Avalked sloavlv down the street I was A-ery busy taking notes—for the paper. " Such and such number, such ;iiid such street, cornice down: tins building, Toof down ; that building crumbled." And then " Good Lord !" I exclaimed to myself after a Avhilc, with childish peevishness, "I'm not going to take a list of all the buildings in the city!" I kept on going toward the paper. I thought that I was observing very carefully, but I wasn't. I remember now. for instance, seeing the roof of tlie Hotel Savoy caved into the building. And yet I did not try to find out if many had been hurt or killed. It was rather unimportant derail that struck my eyes. In Union square T remember a man in pink pyjamas, a. pink bath-robe, carrying a pink comforter under his arm, Avalking barefooted upon the gravel. In the centre of the square an old man was Avith great concentration of purpose deciphering the inscription of the Dewey monument through spectacles of which the glasses had fallen out. I cut across through the square, imd for the first time I heard so.meone speak. A man said to me " Look .*' I looked the Avay he was pointing, at a a three-storey Arooden building called the Geary. It stood between an unfinished building at the corner of Stockton and Geary streets and another tall building. The tAvo sky-scrapers had shaken off their side walls upon the wooden one nestling between them, and only the facade of the latter stood, like cardboard scenery. At one of the windows Avas a man._ He was trailing to the ground a long piece of cloth that looked no thicker than a ribbon, with the evident intention of sliding down by it. T shouted to him to wait a moment, and ran to the door. I found the stairs still up, stuck along the front wall as with mucilage. 1 went up to the third floor over piles of plaster and laths, and there forgot about the man. For I came to a piece of room in which was a bed covered with debris, and out of the debris a olim wh'te hand and wrist were sticking lik" an appeal. T threw off the stuff, and a woman was b?neath, still alive, a little, slender thing, whom I had no trouble in carrying down to the sidewalk, where someone put her on an express waggon. I went back with another man, and we found a second woman, j whom Ave took down on a door. She ' seemed to be dying. There was another j Avoman in another corner, but a pile of j Lricks was upon her, and she Avas dead. Bv this time the ruins »-e.i>. juurlv J

swarming with rescuers, and a policeman had to drive away many of them with his club. All the time, however, I could hear a mysterious and insistent wailing somewhere in back. Finally I located it on the second floor. A strip of the hallway still remained along the right walk I followed it till I came to a place where the whole hall was intact, and there, as upon a platform amid the ruins, a woman with long, dishevelled hair was pacing to and fro, repeating in a long-drawn wail, over and over again: “Oh, my husband is cead, and a young man is dead, and a woman is dead. Ob, my husband is dead, and a' young man is dead, and a woman is dead!” “Where is your husband?” we roared in her ear, for she seemed unable to hear us. {She pointed toward tho back. We went toward the back, and came to the abrupt end of the hall. Below ns was a mound of bricks, with ‘ the end of a bed-post emerging. Mechanically wc began, three, of us, to take up tlie bricks one by one, throwing them behind us. Above us towered the walls of the homicidal building. Alter a while a fireman, joined us. He seemed stupefied, and, like us, began to take up bricks one by one. Finally another fireman caine and called him “Come on, Bill,” ho said, “there’s fires.” They went off, and then, after we had worked a time longer, a redheaded youth who was digging with ns said : “ Wat’s de nso of digging out those that’s dead?” This remark struck us all as so profoundly true that without another word wo all quit. I wont down to the ‘ Gall ’ to report. Tho sun was rising behind a smoky pall already floating- above the populous district south of Market street. The ‘Gall’ building, the highest in the city, was unmarred by the earthquake, and so was the building of the ‘Examiner,’ across Third street from tho ‘ Call,’ and that of tho ‘Chronicle,’ across Market street, from tho ‘ Examiner.’ The editorial building of the ‘Call,’ however, in the narrow alley back of the main building, was shaky. At the door I met Bowie, the acting city editor, tho first man at his station. “ Hopper,” ho said, “the Brunswick Hotel at Sixth and Folsom is down, with hundreds inside of her. You cover that.” This order seemed perfectly natural to me. In spite of what wo had already seen, our power of realisation was behind tilne, as it was to bo through the three days’ progressive disaster. Going up into the editorial rooms with water to my ankles, I seized a bunch of copy paper and started up Third street. At Tehama street I saw the beginning of the firo which was to sweep all the district south of Market, street. It was swirling up the narrow way with a- sound that was almost a scream. Before it the humble population of the district were fleeing, and in its path, as far as I could eoc, trail shanties went down like card houses. And this marks the true character of tho city's agony. Especially in the populous district south of Market street, but also throughout the city, hundreds were pinned down by the debris, some to a merciful deutn, others to live hideous minutes. The flames swept over them while the saved looked on impotently. Over the tragedy the fire threw its llaming mantle of hypocrisy, and tho full extent of the holocaust will never be known —will remain for ever a poignant, mystery. Tho firemen were there, beginning the tremendous and hopeless fight which, without intermission, they were to continue for three days. Without water (the mains had been burst by the quake) they were attacking the lire with axes, with hooks, with sacks, with their hands, retreating sullenly before it only when its feverish breath burned their ‘clothing and their skins. I went back to _ Market street and slopped an automobile. It was a private machine, ehauffoured by one of tho city's gilded youths, but he jumped at wv offer of sCdo! tor the day's hire—another example of tho twisted vision of us all, which refused to acknowledge the true stupeudousmss of what was happening. I whirred off north into the Latin quarter to see to tho safety of friends I had there. Its destruction was in keeping with the picturesque reputation of the district. The low brick buildings built in the pioneer days had nearly all thrown their fronts into the narrow streets, and their interiors were shown cross-sectioned like the doll nousos }oa see in toy stores. Jho house of Henry Lafller. the writer, was so. his bookcase, writing table, and bed showiim like furniture on a stage. Beneath the P3. ra.niid of bricks that had- been the front of the building a dead Chinaman lav. one long yellow hand stretching out of the loose sleeve, of his blouse. But a note pinned upon the remnants of the stairs told me that Baffler was safe. 1 went on to the studio of Martinez, the painter. Tho old building still stood. The studio was full of bricks, but a ncatlv stacked pile of paintings in the centre told me that the painter was safe. How these two men escaped is beyond my imagination. Back to the paper wo whizzed. We passed firemen fighting the fire, which had jumped Market street, and was beginning to devour the wholesale and financial district. _ At the paper I picked up “Scotty” Morrison, our old policeman, and Bvers, one of the “cubs.” They had walked miles to report. This time we had a rearer appreciation of what was hnppenxng, and our orders were to cover the progress of tho fire and get a. list of the dead. As we left, the Grand Opera-house where a few hours before I had been listening to Caruso, was burning with explosive violence, together with the back of the editorial rooms. The main ‘Call’ building was to be our reporting place. We started first to cover the tire I had seen start on its westward course from Third street. From that time I have only 0, i agile kaleidoscopic vision of whirring at whistling speed through a city of the damned. We tried to make tlie fallen Brunswick _ Hotel at Sixth and Folsom streets. We could not make it. The scarlet •steeplechaser heat us to it, and ■vrbr?n wc arrived tho crusher! structure was only the base, of one grea.t flame that rose to heaven with a single twist. Bv that time wc knew Unit the earthquake had been but u prologue, a-nd th;U the tragedy was to he written in tire. Wc went westward to got the western limit of the blaze.

Already wo had to make a, huge circle to get above it. The whole district south of Market street was now a pitiful sight. By thousands the multitudes Avere palterim' along the wide streets leading out heads bowed, eyes dead, silent and stupefied We stopped m passing at the Southern Pacific Hospital. Carts, trucks, express waggons vehicles of all kinds laden with wounded, Ayeie blocking the gate. Upon the pomh stoou two,internes, and their white aprons were red-spotted as- these of butchers. There Avere 125 Avounded ins-id e and ek-ht dead Among the wounded was Chief Sullivan of the Fire Department, A chimney of the California Hotel had crushed through his house at the Hist shock of the earthquake and he atfc' his wife had been taken out of the debus with incredible difficulty. He was to die two days later, spared the bitter, hopeless effort which his men Avere to know. As Ave were leaving, two men came to the gate. They Avere pulling a Ion" the street a sheet of corrugated" iron °upon which lay an old woman with both feet charred. We bore her hi, and yhe actually smiled as avc laid her upon a cot. At Thirteenth and Valencia streets a policeman and n crowd oi A-olunteers wero tiying to raise the debris of a house where a, man and a Avoman Avere pinned. One block further wo came to a place where the ground had sunk 6ft. A fissure ran along Fourteenth street for several blocks, and tho car tracks had been jammed akm* their length till they rose in angular projec"hons 3ft or 4ft high. As we were examining the phenomenon in a narrow wav called Treat avenue a quake occurred- It came upon the fag-end of endurance of the poor folk crowding the alley. Women sank to tbeir knees, drew their shawk about their little ones, broke out in piercing Lamenta* tions, while men ran up and down aimlessly, wringing their hands. An old woman, led by a crippled old man, c-ame wailing down the steps of a porch, and she was blind. In the centre of the street they both fell, and all the'poor encouragement we could give them could not raise them. They had made up their minds to die. I looked at my watch, and was astounded to see that it was only half-past eight. On Valencia .street, between Rhditeentlt and" Nineteenth, the Valencia Hotel, a. four-storey Avooden ■ lodging-house, was down, its tour stories telescoDed to the

height of one, its upper rooms ripped open' with the cross-section effect of a dollhouse. A squad of policemen and some fKtv volun teens were working with rageful energy at the tangle of walls and rafters. Eleven men were known to have escaped, eight had been taken out dead, and more than ICO were still in the ruins. The street here was sunk 6ft, and again, as I was to .see it.many times more, I saw that strange angular raise of the tracks as if tlie ground had boon pinched between some- gigantic fingers. , We went down toward the fire now. We met it on Eighth street. From Third it had come along in a swath four blocks wide. From Market to Folsom, from Second to Eighth, it spread its heaving red sea, and with a roar it was rushing on, its advance billow curling like a monstrous comber above a flotsam of fleeing humanity. There were men, women, and children. Men, women, and children—really that is about all I remember of them, ejeept that they were miserable and crushed. Here and there are still little snapshots in my mind—a woman carrying in a cage a green and rod parrot, squawking incessantly " Hurry, hurry, hurry"; a little smudgefaced girl with long-lashed brown eyes holding in her arms a blind puppy; a man with naked torso carrying upon his head a hideous ehromo; another with a mattress I a cracked mirror. But by this time l/To cataclysm itself, its manifestation, its ferocious splendor, hypnotised the brain, ;ind humans sink into insignificance as ants caught in the elide of a mountain. One more scene I remember. On Eighth street, between Folsom and Howard, was an empty sand lot right in the path of the conflagration. It was full of refugees, and what struck me was their immobility. They sat there upon trunks, upon bundles of clothing. On each side, like the claws of a crab, the tire was closing in upon them. Tbey sat there motionless, as if cast of bronze, as if indeed they were wrought upon some frieze representing the Misery of Humanity. The fire roared, burning coals showered them, the heat rose, their clothes smoked, and they still sat there, upon their poor little boxes, their bundles of rags, their goods, the pathetic little hoard which they had been able to treasure in their arid lives, a fixed determination in their staring eyes not to leave again, not to move another step, to die there and then, with the treasures for the saving of which their bodies had no further strength. We whirled down Harrison street, along the southern edge of the fire, which up to that time was not spreading much toward that side. The streets were choked with trucks, with baby carriages, with cabs, with toy express waggons; and a procession of silent people, stupefied by the incredible and progressive calamity, was marching stolidly out of the citv which had proven a trap. Passing Fifth street w© caught, behind the flaming smother, a glimpse of the Mint, square, squat, like a rock in the flaming sea. Its iron windows were all closed; it brooded there, unmoved, inscrutable as a sphinx. Later we learned that behind those iron doors men had lived through the maelstrom of firehad lived and fought, and had saved the building. West, of it, a long white skyscraper towered, still untouched. It was never touched. I saw it a few days later, rising white, unsullied, above the surrounding desolation. I ie-ad its name, and. the tremendous irony of it staggered me. "The United Undertakers" was written into'the granite above the door. At Third street we caught the startingpoint of the fire. It had worked north as well as west, and the 'Call' building, the tallest skyscraper in the city, was glowing like a phosphorescent worm. Cataracts of pulverised fire poured out of the thousand windows. The 'Examiner' building, across the way, was burning. The Palace Hotel, treasured perhaps above everything by San Franciscans, was smoking, but was* still making a magnificent fight. To the east the fire had gone as far as Second street. There it had leaped Market street toward the north, and was roaring, a, maelstrom of flame, through the wholesale district, before the south-eastern breeze. We circled to the north, thiough the- Latin quarter, picturesque in its ruins as it had been in life. I it-member passing six dead houses under a pile of bricks on Washington street. We went up toward the Hayes Valley district, in which heavy volutes of smoke announced another conflagration. In passing I stopped nt the Neptune, where I had been at the time of the earthquake, five hours before. The fire had not yet reached it. I ran up to my room. A key was in the door. "Looters," I aid to myself. I pushed open the- door. Spick and span in his white clothing, Ah Wing, the Chinese chamberman, Ava.« making my bed. The room Avas swept, the plaster that had fallen gathered in a heap in the hall, my clothes were all hanging in the closet, and he was putting a clean slip about my pillow. Coming out of the Avhirl of death and devastation, this piece of domestic fidelity absolutely flabbergasted me. I closed the door upon it and left on tiptoe, as in the presence of some sacred rite. I'd like to see Ah Wing again. When, the next morning, it struck me at last that it was time to take my things out, I wasn't able to get within fifteen blocks of the Neptune. Now, all that remains is the arch of the door,' and a nameless chaos of pulverised and halfvolatilised things in the cellar, among them the results of Ah Wing's industry. I devoutly hope he is alive, with a little hoard of gold in hi-s wide sleeves, enough to buy him a ticket on the P.M. to old Canton. We went up to Hayes Valley to examine the fire there. We passed the Citv Hall. the building upon Avhich the city had spent six millions. It, had crumbled at the assault of the quake, and was now a ruin, noble with a beauty that it had lacked when entire. Here and there a massive column rose with its architrave, giving an effect of Babylonian splendor. Above, the dome, divorced of stone, showed its naked skeleton, twisted as from some monstrous torture. The Central Emergency Hospital Avas blocked with an avalanche of huge stones.

The. fire, we. found, already covered four square blocks, and was sweeping toward the east. We went before it, and stopped at the Mechanics' Pavilion, the Madison squaie Garden of San Francisco. All the morning it had been used as a great hospital, but now, before the menace of the fire the last patients Avere being transferred to the Military Hospital at the Presidio We waited till tlie tire came. The immense Avcoden structure caught with almost explosive violence, and when we left the rums of the City Hall were catching We circled the fire south of Market street again and found that it had reached Twelfth street. At one o'clock we tried to reiwrt to the 'Chronicle' building. The 'Examiner,' the Palace Hotel, and the Grand were burning fiercely by that time and we could not reach it." We started on another tour of the fires.

It was just about that time that the wind, which had betn slight and from the east, turned to a spanking breeze from the north-werf. This sealed the doom of the city. By the time we had arrived at the fire south of Market street, it had spread from Fourteenth street down to the bav and this iriimense frontage, driven by the wind, was moving south and east the blocks literally melting before its advance We circled far to the south. We stopped at St. Mary's Hospital, on Rincon Hill at the fouth-east corner of the City The whole city below, from Fourteenth'street to the ferries, was one great flame, which smacked m the wind like the stupendous silken flag of some cosmic anarchy. Below the silken, whirring sound of it there was a muttered roar as it thousands of tumbrils were rolling over an endless bridge, and tb dynamite, used-now in a. last effort to coi* fine the conflagration, pulsed in dull reverberations. The patients of the hospital were being removed to steamers lying in i the bav below. s I

_We circled along tl-e water-front, every-1 thing to tho west of as a flaming chao- Ud Market street the great building* writhed like so many live beings in the agony of li_ entire wllo '«sa J e dLtrict from the bay to Sansome and north to Washington was burnmg. As they burned, the buildings crashed down upon what the earthquake had thrown, and the streets were as those of. a barricaded city in the throes of its last assault. The United States Twenty-second Infaiitrv was garrisoned at the Appraiser's Building, and all along Washington street the troopers, aided were noosing roges .about liis

wooden shacks, relics of the'sixties, and pulling them down in gigantic tugs-of-war, .one hundred men. to a rope."J At: the Hall of Justice, in the.midst of the Latin quarter, the Mayor, the : Chief'-"of Police, and their staffs, together with the' Citizens' Committee appointed ■ immediately 'after the earthquake, Avere gathered in the basement. In the half-darkness, beneath the'' 'lowvaulted ceiling, they V sat at - long tables, their faces yellow in the "light of; the sputtering candles, and conferred in "whispers. Near them was stretched a' long Ime.of stiff forms beneath white sheets. ,Ou£ in Portsmouth square, m front,-the- prisoners of the gaol sat huddled in handcuffed groups. While we were there they began to move the dead from'the hall, 'for: the fixe was very near doav, and soon a line of sheeted figures lay in the green grass before the Stephenson monument. By five o'clock the Hall of Justice -was burning, "the headquarters had been removed to the big Fairmont Hotel on-the tip-top of .Nob Hill, the prisoners to Alcatraz, and the dead lay underground, the Stephenson bark,- its bronze sails swollen with the eagerness of departure, their monument ■•:■■■:

Almost at the same time the fire, which had swept the wholesale district below Sansoine, jumped Kearney street, and with a rattle of eagerness fastened upon China-toAA-n, Avith its carved balconies, .its multicolored signs, its painted and jrilded flimsiness. At the same time, doubling back, it came down Montgomery, San Francisco's Wall street, and Kearney, fairly Avhistling down the deep, narrow corridors. By eight o'clock the Kohl and Mills building and the Merchants' Exchange flamed like torches, and the destruction of the business blocks of the city was complete, v At seven o'clock the staffs of the 'Call' and the 'Chronicle' met for a conference in the editorial rooms of the ' Evening Bulletin.' The pink glow of the fire, near-by on three sides now, Avas the only light The orders given to the 'Chronicle' men were: "The men of the''Chronicle' will meet at the ' Chronicle', building to-morrow at one o'clock, if there is any ' Chronicle.'" The orders to the 'Call' staff were: "The men of the 'Call' will meet at the Fairmont to-morrow at one o'clock, if there is any to-morrow." There Avas a to-mor-row, but long before one o'clock the ' Chronicle ' was a gutted ruin, and the magnificent Fairmont, like a .great Greek temple upon its hill, was blazing like a funeral pyre.

At eight o'clock I was .landing on the corner of Market and Montgomery. The whole south side-of Market "street Avas on fire from end to end. There Avas a lull in the wind, and before me the Palace and Grand Hotels were burning Avith a sort of quiet mournfulness.- Suddenly the great Crocker building, on the north side of the street, began to bum, slowly, one windoAVshado here, one Avindow-s-hade there, with a sort of flippant deliberation. Half an hour after it began to purr softly; then, with a roar, the flames poured out of all the openings. This was the beginning of Avhat might bo called the fourth main fire. It went north, caught the 'Chronicle,' and then steeplechased up Gearv, Post, and Sutter streets, melting before it the rich retail section and then the private hotel district. At ten o'clock the huge new St. Francis Hotel, on Union square, was burning. The fire spread as it Avent west. It united with that of ChinatoAvn, then "with that of Hayes Valley, and the three, hand m hand in formidable alliance, marched, keeping step, toward the west Avith a frontage of nearly tAAo miles.

All night-the city bumed with a copper glow, and all night the dynamite of the fire fighters boomed at slow intervals, the pulse of the great city in its agony. When the sun rose, a red Avafer behind clouds of smoke that were as crape, the tidal wa\-e of flame had swept three-quarters of it. Nob Hill, the Fairmont, the homes of thp pioneer millionaires, Mark Hopkins's, with its art treasures, Arerc aglow, a ruby tiara upon the city. Before the irresistible advance the people were fleeing toward the sea. For the third time the headquarters of the Government, had been changed, this time to the North. End Police Station. By eleven o'clock that was in damier. and another exodus was made to Franklin Hall, on-Fillmore street, once suburb, now centre. I Avalked down Market street late in the afternoon of the second day. It avos as if I walked through a dead city, not a city recently dead, but one overcome by some cataclysm ages past, and dug out of its lava. Fragments of-Avail rose on .fill sides, columns twisted nut solid in their warp, as if petrified in the midst of their writhing from the fiery ordeal. Across them a yellow smoke passed slowly. Above all, a, heavy, brooding silence lay. And really there was nothing else. Contortion of stone, smoke of destruction, and a great silence—that was all.—' Everybody's Magazine.'