a breastwork, and prayed fervently with bared heads.

Firemen and policemen stumbled up against them with angry words,
stopped, stared, and passed silently by. The fleeing crowd hailed and
fell back. The rush and the roar swirled to the right and to the left,
leaving the little band as if in an eddy, untouched and serene, with
the glow of the fire upon it and the stars paling overhead.

The seven were the Swedish Salvation Army. Their barracks were burning
up in a blast of fire so sudden and so fierce that scant time was
left to save life and goods.

From the tenements next door men and women dragged bundles and
feather-beds, choking stairs and halls, and shrieking madly to be let
out. The police struggled angrily with the torrent. The lodgers in the
Holly-Tree Inn, who had nothing to save, ran for their lives.

In the station-house behind the barracks they were hastily clearing
the prison. The last man had hardly passed out of his cell when, with
a deafening crash, the toppling wall fell upon and smashed the roof of
the jail.

Fire-bells rang in every street as engines rushed from north and
south. A general alarm had called out the reserves. Every hydrant for
blocks around was tapped. Engine crews climbed upon the track of the
elevated road, picketed the surrounding tenements, and stood their
ground on top of the police station.

Up there two crews labored with a Siamese joint hose throwing a stream
as big as a man's thigh. It got away from them, and for a while there
was panic and a struggle up on the heights as well as in the street.
The throbbing hose bounded over the roof, thrashing right and left,
and flinging about the men who endeavored to pin it down like
half-drowned kittens. It struck the coping, knocked it off, and the
resistless stream washed brick and stone down into the yard as upon
the wave of a mighty flood.

Amid the fright and uproar the seven alone were calm. The sun rose
upon their little band perched upon the pile of trunks, victorious and
defiant. It shone upon Old Glory and the Salvation Army's flag
floating from their improvised fort, and upon an ample lake, sprung up
within an hour where yesterday there was a vacant sunken lot. The fire
was out, the firemen going home.

The lodgers in the Holly-Tree Inn, of whom there is one for every day
in the year, looked upon the sudden expanse of water, shivered, and
went in. The tenants returned to their homes. The fright was over,
with the dar