line had been
established to keep persons away from wrecked buildings. There were
jewelry stores whose fronts had been entirely torn off; these would
have been plundered.

All through the city we saw people seated on beds on their front
lawns, their houses having tumbled. On the front lawn of the Hotel
Vendome was a bonfire about which were gathered twenty or thirty
people. Every guest of the house had spent the night there with a
blanket apiece.

We were just in time to catch the first train to go through to San
Francisco. All along the route through such towns as Palo Alto and
Belmont, we saw shattered buildings, warehouses with whole sides
neatly cut off as though with a knife. One big warehouse of brick had
completely buried a freight train standing on a siding.

During the night we could see the dull red glow that came from the
burning city. Now we could see the huge copper-colored clouds that
almost hid the sun. As we came nearer the city we could hear the
distant explosions of the dynamite with which the soldiers were
wrecking the buildings. They came to us in dull but quick thumps.

The train got no further than Valencia street. As soon as we got off
we saw the first stragglers of the great army of the homeless and
ruined.

Sentries stopped us before we had gone a block, so a cheerful
good-looking young fellow, who had seen first his home and his tailor
shop utterly destroyed that morning, offered to be our guide.

He took us past the Hotel Valencia, which was the worst sufferer from
the earthquake. The big building had been literally poured out into
the street in a stream of splintered wood. No one knows how many
people perished in it.

On the corner next the Valencia was a new set of three-story flats,
just completed, and most of the flats not yet occupied. As though some
one had struck it on top with a giant hammer, the entire building had
sunk one story into the ground; you could walk right in at the second
story.

Turning down into Steiner street, we were caught in the flood of the
strangest tide the world ever saw. There never was anything like this
before.

These were people warned to leave their homes from some district newly
doomed to the Fire God.

They were trekking, in a long, motley procession, to find some park
not already crowded to overflowing.

One of the first that I met was a little family beginning life over
again. What they had been able to rescue before the flames came was