ith their paint cracked and split, its tower tottered,
scorched and feeble, but the building itself was intact. Score one to
Boston, and to the indomitable forces battling for her preservation.

Not without a fearful cost, however, had this victory been gained, for
the east side of Washington Street, from the _Transcript_ down, was now
a flowing field of raging flame. Here there were no fireproofs to give
momentary obstacles; one risk, it is true, had automatic sprinklers
inside and out, but the water from these, while it lasted, only added
steam to the confusion and fuel to the fire, while the great roof tank
in its falling tore out the very heart of the stricken building.
Hawley Street, farther on, was no barrier at all to a fire of such fury
as this, and the unprotected windows at the rear of the Franklin Street
row added their helpless nakedness to a situation in which nothing was
a buckler.

Very orderly, irresistible without vagary, now became the fire's
progress. Terrible in its absolute precision, in its measured advance
down the wind, this implacable river of flame rolled down the city.
Far ahead of the actual fire itself ran its fatal forerunner, the sheet
of gases and superheated air, sometimes level, sometimes high lifted at
the whim of the breeze, but always fierce, always southward, always
with annihilation in its grip. There was no staying this deadly force
and no facing it; farther than any hose stream could reach sped this
outrider in advance of the devastating thing whose messenger it was.

Men from the United States Navy Yard at Charlestown were dynamiting
buildings along Summer Street now, in the hope of gaining a respite by
reducing the amount of fuel in the path of the main advance. The air
was heavy with smoke, with the odor of charred embers and burning wood
and merchandise, and the shock of the dynamiting added new heaviness to
an almost unbreathable element. So acrid had the atmosphere become
that the men in the front ranks of the struggle were compelled to
breathe through rags and handkerchiefs soaked in water. Many men
dropped where they stood, to be dragged back by their comrades and
revived by the ambulance surgeons.

Franklin Street proved no more of a southern barrier than had the
others before it. On the corner of Hawley Street stood an eight-story
fireproof, sprinklered building, filled principally with crockery.
Upon this the conflagration advanced as relentlessly as fate.