ale smoke in his
nostrils and a vague dimness of sight. Even the thousand vivid
incidents of the great conflagration were always to come back to him
with this haunting sense of unreality, the feeling that it was not
actually he but some one else who had witnessed and shared and lived
through them--some one not alien, yet not wholly kin to himself. The
gray and ochre smoke haze, and the diffused heat, and the sense of
intimate danger long faced and hence grown hardly noted, clouded and
filmed the facts, the colors, and the emotions of this day in the dim
light of a dream.

They were wild facts, too; great deeds; and glorious colors, which
would have been worth a clearer recollection. The color of the
midnight sky, its velvet blackness shot with crimson gleams. The waves
of smoke, now like densest ink pouring up from some unseen funereal
funnel--now blindingly white, flung like the plume of Navarre above the
tumult of the fray. The tall, cold buildings standing almost defiantly
in the winter air, lifting their immobile fronts to face the
onrush--and the same buildings a little later, when the flames had
passed, leaving only gnawed skeletons and heaped and smoldering ruins
in their wake. The grim and terrible anguish of twisted steel girders
that lay writhen like petrified snakes among the ashes, or lifted their
tortured length to reach some last hold on sanity at the wall which
they had once helped maintain. Great heaps and piles of ashes, and
half-consumed beams and crushed and broken brick, lying in smoldering
humility, punctuated by stray relics and remnants of an unburned
world--pieces of furniture, by some miracle left unharmed, or
bric-a-brac of some more than usual inanity. Fireproof buildings
through which the flood of destruction had passed, burning all that was
burnable, and leaving the gaunt frames naked in the air, their
exteriors perhaps scorched and defaced, but with their vast strength
unshaken and undismayed. The thousand sounds and odors of the fearful
night and of the slow dawn; the fire whistles shrilling through the
wintry air, the gongs on truck and cart adding their clangor to the mad
mellay, the shouts of men, the bawling of orders, the screams of
frightened women, the uncanny sound of the mewing of an imprisoned cat
in a window, whose instinct told it what its sense could not. The
hammer of horses' hoofs on the stones of the street, with the sparks
flung out to left and right beneath the