-escape ladders, front and
rear, with shrieks and wailing. In the street the crowd became a
deadly crush. Police and firemen battered their way through, ran down
and over men, women, and children, with a desperate effort.

The firemen from Hook and Ladder Six, around the corner, had heard the
shrieks, and, knowing what they portended, ran with haste. But they
were too late with their extinguishers; could not even approach the
burning flat. They could only throw up their ladders to those above.
For the rest they must needs wait until the engines came.

One tore up the street, coupled on a hose, and ran it into the house.
Then died out the fire in the flat as speedily as it had come. The
burning room was pumped full of water, and the firemen entered.

Just within the room they came upon little Jacob, still alive, but
half roasted. He had struggled from the bed nearly to the door. On the
bed lay the body of Isaac, the youngest, burned to a crisp.

They carried Jacob to the police station. As they brought him out, a
frantic woman burst through the throng and threw herself upon him. It
was the children's mother come back. When they took her to the
blackened corpse of little Ike, she went stark mad. A dozen neighbors
held her down, shrieking, while others went in search of the father.

In the street the excitement grew until it became almost
uncontrollable when the dead boy was carried out.

In the midst of it little Abe returned, pale, silent, and frightened,
to stand by his raving mother.

A LITTLE PICTURE

The fire-bells rang on the Bowery in the small hours of the morning.
One of the old dwelling-houses that remain from the day when the
"Bouwerie" was yet remembered as an avenue of beer-gardens and
pleasure resorts was burning. Down in the street stormed the firemen,
coupling hose and dragging it to the front. Upstairs in the peak of
the roof, in the broken skylight, hung a man, old, feeble, and gasping
for breath, struggling vainly to get out. He had piled chairs upon
tables, and climbed up where he could grasp the edge, but his strength
had given out when one more effort would have freed him. He felt
himself sinking back. Over him was the sky, reddened now by the fire
that raged below. Through the hole the pent-up smoke in the building
found vent and rushed in a black and stifling cloud.

"Air, air!" gasped the old man. "O God, water!"

There was a swishing sound, a splash, and the copious spray of a