en away the light ashes. Joss houses
and mission schools, grocery stores and opium dens, gambling hells and
theaters--all of them went. The buildings blazed up like tissue paper
lanterns used when the guttering candles touched their sides.

"From this place I, following the fire, saw hundreds of crazed yellow
men flee. In their arms they bore their opium pipes, their money bags,
their silks, and their children. Beside them ran the baggy trousered
women, and some of them hobbled painfully.

"These were the men and women of the surface. Far beneath the street
levels in those cellars and passageways were many others. Women who
never saw the day from their darkened prisons and their blinking
jailors were caught like rats in a huge trap. Their bones were eaten
by the flames.

"And now there remain only the holes. They pit the hillside like a
multitude of ground swallow nests. They go to depths which the police
never penetrated. The secrets of those burrows will never be known,
for into them the hungry fire first sifted its red coals and then
licked eagerly in tongues of creeping flames, finally obliterating
everything except the earth itself."

"The scenes to be witnessed in San Francisco were beyond description,"
said Mr. Oliver Posey, Jr.

"Not alone did the soldiers execute the law. One afternoon, in front
of the Palace Hotel, a crowd of workers in the ruins discovered a
miscreant in the act of robbing a corpse of its jewels. Without delay
he was seized, a rope was procured, and he was immediately strung up
to a beam which was left standing in the ruined entrance of the Palace
Hotel.

"No sooner had he been hoisted up and a hitch taken in the rope than
one of his fellow criminals was captured. Stopping only to secure a
few yards of hemp, a knot was quickly tied and the wretch was soon
adorning the hotel entrance by the side of the other dastard."

Jack Spencer, well known here, also returned home yesterday, and had
much to say of the treatment of those caught in the act of rifling the
dead of their jewels.

"At the corner of Market and Third streets on Wednesday," said Mr.
Spencer of Los Angeles, "I saw a man attempting to cut the fingers
from the hand of a dead woman in order to secure the rings. Three
soldiers witnessed the deed at the same time and ordered the man to
throw up his hands. Instead of obeying he drew a revolver from his
pocket and began to fire without warning.

"The three soldiers, reinforced