For one moment it
veered, and our hearts almost stood still with hope; but it swung back,
and a feeling of despair settled upon us.

Our house was full. One poor lady, with a little baby only a week old,
lay on a sofa in one of the rooms; near her, bent over in a
rocking-chair, sat an old woman who had not been out of her house for
five years, with a look of hopeless bewilderment on her wrinkled face.
But people were now beginning to move from our house. India Street was
almost blocked up. Every kind of vehicle that went upon wheels, from a
barouche to a wheelbarrow, passed by laden with furniture.

At this moment my brother and brother-in-law approached, blackened
almost beyond recognition. It was not until C---- spoke that I really
knew him.

"We must be calm and collected, and save what we can. John is trying to
get a team to carry mother up to L----'s; the rest of us will have to go
to the graveyard. But John may not be successful, so you stay here, and
see if you can get any one to take mother: they may do it for you, when
they wouldn't for a man."

I stood on the edge of the sidewalk, clinging to the horse-post, and
appealed in vain to wagons going by.

"_Won't_ you take a lady and children away from here?"

"I _can't_, ma'am, not if you was to give me twenty-five dollars,--not
if you was to give me five hundred. I'm taking a load for a gentleman
now."

So it was in every case. Very many were worse off than we were,--had not
even a man to help. One well-known citizen was appealed to for help, in
the early part of the evening, by a poor woman,--a sort of dependant of
his family. He took her and her daughter, with their effects, outside
the city, and returned to find India Street on fire and no means of
getting through the crowd to his house, which was burned, with all that
was not saved by the exertions of his wife. They had visiting them a
lady whose child lay dead in the house, awaiting burial. The mother took
the little corpse in her arms and carried it herself up to the other end
of the city!

While I was making these vain attempts, John drove up in a light,
open-topped buggy. We hurriedly got mother and E---- into it, and gave
into their charge the jewelry and silver, and they drove away. I could
not but tremble for their safety. The road seemed impassable, so dense
was the struggling crowd. On every side the fire was raging. Looking up
India Street it was one sheet of flame, and equally so before us