digging up statues and tablets and things."

"But this isn't a buried town. It's a real town, built perhaps twenty
or thirty years ago; and it's located out in northern Indiana. And a
perfectly nice little town, with brick stores and a couple of paved
streets and other advantages. Everything--except inhabitants. No one
lives there."

"Why not? Is this really true?"

"True as gospel. I saw it myself. I walked through the deserted
streets. And a rather uncanny feeling it gave me, too."

"Was it unhealthy? Why did the people leave?"

"I haven't the vaguest idea," said Smith; and as he answered he raised
his arm to point eastward along the street they had that moment
reached. Following the direction in which he was pointing, Helen saw a
thin line of smoke rising feebly from a pile of debris upon the ground.
Near by were similar piles, sullenly smoldering.

"There's where they stopped it," said Smith.

They walked quickly along until they came to the very corner on which
the last ebbing wave of the sea of fire had turned. This corner was at
the intersection of Shawmut Avenue with the railroad's right of way.
Over the tracks at this point was a raised steel bridge, and to this
they now directed their steps. At the end of the bridge they stopped.
The bridge was elevated sufficiently so that they could see a
considerable distance northward, and for some moments they stood and
looked in silence at the sight which lay beyond them.

It was something which is only to be seen once in the course of an
ordinary lifetime--the complete ruin of the integral part of a great
city. With something too remote yet too bitterly real for any words
gripping at her heart, Helen stood looking out over a scene such as she
never could have imagined. Here was ruin incarnate, desolation
supreme; this was the bitter tragedy of that which once was great
turned suddenly into pitiful nothingness before her very eyes.

In the foreground, at their feet, lay the heaped debris of the bricks,
timbers, and contents of a whole row of dynamited buildings--the
sacrificed buildings which by their own destruction had checked the
conflagration at the last. There they lay, still smoldering or blazing
in some places, utterly still and lifeless in others, with stray beams
and bits of cornice or of tin roofing, twisted into weird shapes,
sticking out at odd angles. Here and there unconsumed and hardly
damaged articles that had been contained in t