and use it. I have
property, if I could realize on it. I have friends, if I could get to
them. Meantime I am going to cook this piece of bacon on bricks and be
happy."

She was only one of thousands like her.

In a walk through the city this note of cheerfulness of the people in
the face of an almost incredible week of horror was to a correspondent
the mitigating element to the awfulness of disaster.

In the streets of the residential district in the western addition,
which the fire did not reach, women of the houses were cooking meals on
the pavement. In most cases they had moved out the family ranges,
and were preparing the food which they had secured from the Relief
Committee.

Out on Broderick street, near the Panhandle, a piano sounded. It was
nigh ten o'clock and the stars were shining after the rain. Fires
gleamed up and down through the shrubbery and the refugees sat huddled
together about the flames, with their blankets about their heads,
Apache-like, in an effort to dry out after the wetting of the afternoon.
The piano, dripping with moisture, stood on the curb, near the front of
a cottage which had been wrecked by the earthquake.

A youth with a shock of red hair sat on a cracker box and pecked at the
ivories. "Home Ain't Nothing Like This" was thrummed from the rusting
wires with true vaudeville dash and syncopation. "Bill Bailey," "Good
Old Summer Time," "Dixie" and "In Toyland" followed. Three young men
with handkerchiefs wrapped about their throats in lieu of collars stood
near the pianist and with him lifted up their voices in melody. The
harmony was execrable, the time without excuse, but the songs ran
through the trees of the Panhandle, and the crows, forgetting their
misery for a time, joined the strange chorus.

The people had their tales of comedy, one being that on the morning of
the fire a richly dressed woman who lived in one of the aristocratic
Sutter Street apartments came hurrying down the street, faultlessly
gowned as to silks and sables, save that one dainty foot was shod with
a high-heeled French slipper and the other was incased in a laborer's
brogan. They say that as she walked she careened like a bark-rigged ship
before a typhoon.

An hour spent behind the counter of the food supply depot in the park
tennis court yielded rich reward to the seeker after the outlandish. The
tennis court was piled high with the plunder of several grocery stores
and the cargoes of many relief cars.