eveler and all were on the same footing. All the day I
spent in San Francisco, I only heard one person speak unkindly to
another. I wish I had that young man's name, just as a curiosity. He
had been hired by a woman to drag a big Roman chair filled with
treasures up the street.
"There," he said, insolently, "I have earned all the money I got for
that; now take it along yourself."
Without a word, the woman took the chair from him and wheeled it on
herself.
One rather amusing group was wheeling an immense and very handsome
dining-room table. The young man who was pulling from the front was
protesting vigorously; but the two young girls who shoved from behind,
digging their stubby fashionable little oxford ties in the dirt for
foothold, urged him peremptorily on. Following them was a half-grown
hobbledehoy boy, strong enough to have packed an ox, who was doing his
heavy share by carrying a little glass vase.
In a doorway half way up the hill, I saw an old Chinaman sitting with
his bundle, which was all he had been able to save. He was just
saying, "Oh, oh, oh," in a curious, half-sobbing moan that never
seemed to cease.
The young tailor with me said the Chinaman had lost his laundry and
was terror-stricken lest the white people should make him pay for
their clothes.
While his own tailor shop was burning, the young tailor said that he
was out trying to rescue the trapped victims in the burning Hotel
Brunswick.
He could only get hold of one living man. He seemed to be caught in
the wreckage, the smoke being too thick to permit one to see just how.
Strong hands caught his feet and pulled desperately. When they dragged
him out at last, they found that he had been caught under the chin. In
pulling him out they cut his throat almost from ear to ear.
As we gained the top of the hill on Steiner street, a San Francisco
man who came in with me on the train stopped dead still. "My God; look
there!" he said, his voice catching with a sob.
Through the rift of the buildings we caught our first glimpse of the
dying city.
"That was Market street," said the San Francisco man, softly.
He pointed across a vast black plain, hundreds of acres in extent, to
a row of haggard, gaunt specters that did seem to be in two lines like
a street.
"There's the City Hall," he said, tremulously, pointing to a large
dome surmounting a pile of ruins and surrounded like some hellish
island with vast stretches of smouldering ashes a
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