e night, shrieks of mangled and
dying, moans of babies with life oozing from their blue lips,
columns of smoke ascending through icy, soaking air, and a vast
glare of wicked light with flame demons leaping for joy in the
measureless woe over which they were presiding. As the little
party was passing the fire lines, Ashbel's foot slipped on a
freezing ooze of blood and slush, and he fell sprawling upon a
human body battered and trampled until it was like an overturned
basket of butcher's odds and ends.

The station house was eleven long squares away. But before they
started for it they were already at the lowest depth of physical
wretchedness which human nerves can register; thus, they
arrived simply a little more numb. The big room, heated by a
huge, red-hot stove to the point where the sweat starts, was
crowded with abject and pitiful human specimens. Even Susan, the
most sensitive person there, gazed about with stolid eyes. The
nakedness of unsightly bodies, gross with fat or wasted to
emaciation, the dirtiness of limbs and torsos long, long
unwashed, the foul steam from it all and from the water-soaked
rags, the groans of some, the silent, staring misery of others,
and, most horrible of all, the laughter of those who yielded
like animals to the momentary sense of physical well-being as
the heat thawed them out--these sights and sounds together made
up a truly infernal picture. And, like all the tragedies of
abject poverty, it was wholly devoid of that dignity which is
necessary to excite the deep pity of respect, was sordid and
squalid, moved the sensitive to turn away in loathing rather
than to advance with brotherly sympathy and love.

Ashbel, his animal instinct roused by the sight of the stove,
thrust the throng aside rudely as he pushed straight for the
radiating center. Etta and Susan followed in his wake. The
fierce heat soon roused them to the sense of their plight.
Ashbel began to curse, Etta to weep. Susan's mind was staring,
without hope but also without despair, at the walls of the trap
in which they were all caught--was seeking the spot where they
could begin to burrow through and escape.

Beds and covers were gathered in by the police from everywhere
in that district, were ranged upon the floor of the four rooms.
The men were put in the cells downstairs; the women and the
children got the cots. Susan and Etta lay upon the same
mattress, a horse blanket over them. Etta slept; Susan, wide