. By the fourth night, which was
rainy, tents and huts had brought most campers under cover.

I went through the city again eight days later. The fire was out, and
about a quarter of the area stood unconsumed. Intact skyscrapers
dominated the smoking level majestically and superbly--they and a few
walls that had survived the overthrow. Thus has the courage of our
architects and builders received triumphant vindication!

The inert elements of the population had mostly got away, and those
that remained seemed what Mr. H. G. Wells calls "efficients." Sheds
were already going up as temporary starting-points of business. Every
one looked cheerful, in spite of the awful discontinuity of past and
future, with every familiar association with material things
dissevered; and the discipline and order were practically perfect.

As these notes of mine must be short, I had better turn to my more
generalized reflections.

Two things in retrospect strike me especially, and are the most
emphatic of all my impressions. Both are reassuring as to human nature.

The first of these was the rapidity of the improvisation of order out
of chaos. It is clear that just as in every thousand human beings
there will be statistically so many artists, so many athletes, so many
thinkers, and so many potentially good soldiers, so there will be so
many potential organizers in times of emergency. In point of fact, not
only in the great city, but in the outlying towns, these natural
ordermakers, whether amateurs or officials, came to the front
immediately. There seemed to be no possibility which there was not
some one there to think of, or which within twenty-four hours was not
in some way provided for.

A good illustration is this: Mr. Keith is the great landscape-painter
of the Pacific slope, and his pictures, which are many, are
artistically and pecuniarily precious. Two citizens, lovers of his
work, early in the day diverted their attention from all other
interests, their own private ones included, and made it their duty to
visit every place which they knew to contain a Keith painting. They
cut them from their frames, rolled them up, and in this way got all the
more important ones into a place of safety.

When they then sought Mr. Keith, to convey the joyous news to him, they
found him still in his studio, which was remote from the fire,
beginning a new painting. Having given up his previous work for lost,
he had resolved to lose no