, screaming and moaning at the little shocks that at intervals
followed the great one. The dawn was just breaking. The gas and electric
mains were gone and the street lamps were all out. The sky was growing
white in the east, but before the sun could fling his early rays from
the horizon there came another light, a lurid and threatening one, that
of the flames that had begun to rise in the warehouse district.

The braver men and those without families to watch over set out for this
endangered region, half dressed as they were. In the early morning light
they could see the business district below them, many of the buildings
in ruins and the flames showing redly in five or six places. Through the
streets came the fire engines, called from the outlying districts by a
general alarm. The firemen were not aware as yet that no water was to be
had.

THE PANIC IN THE SLUMS.

On Portsmouth Square the panic was indescribable. This old tree plaza,
about which the early city was built, is now in the centre of Chinatown,
of the Italian district and of the "Barbary Coast," the "Tenderloin" of
the Western metropolis. It is the chief slum district of the city. The
tremor here ran up the Chinatown hill and shook down part of the crazy
buildings on its southern edge. It brought ruin also to some of the
Italian tenements. Portsmouth Square became the refuge of the terrified
inhabitants. Out from their underground burrows like so many rats fled
the Chinese, trembling in terror into the square, and seeking by beating
gongs and other noise-making instruments to scare off the underground
demons. Into the square from the other side came the Italian refugees.
The panic became a madness, knives were drawn in the insanity of the
moment, and two Chinamen were taken to the morgue, stabbed to death
for no other reason than pure madness. Here on one side dwelt 20,000
Chinese, and on the other thousands of Italians, Spaniards and Mexicans,
while close at hand lived the riff-raff of the "Barbary Coast."

Seemingly the whole of these rushed for that one square of open ground,
the two streams meeting in the centre of the square and heaping up on
its edges. There they squabbled and fought in the madness of panic and
despair, as so many mad wolves might have fought when caught in the
red whirl of a prairie fire, until the soldiers broke in and at the
bayonet's point brought some semblance of order out of the confusion of
panic terror.

This scene i