side
To check that onslaught of red wrath, to stem destruction's tide.
With roar, and boom, and blare, and blast, an open space is cleared at
last.
The fiends of fury gallop past with flanks outstretched and wide;

Around the city's storehouses they wreathe and twine and dance,
And wealth and splendor shrivel up before their swift advance.
Before their devastating breath the stricken people flee.
"Mine, mine your treasures are!" cried Death, and laughs in fiendish glee.
Into that vortex of red hell sink church and theatre, store, hotel.
With thunderous roar and hissing yell on sweeps the crimson sea.

Again with charge of dynamite the lurid clouds are riven;
Again with heat and sulphur smoke the troops are backward driven.
All day, all night, all day again, with that infernal host
They strive in vain for mastery. Each vantage gained is lost,--
On comes the bellowing flood of flame in furious wrath its own to claim;
Resistless in its awful aim each space is bridged and crossed.

Ah God! the miles and miles of waste! One half the city gone!
And westward now--toward Van Ness--the roaring flames roll on.
"Blow up that mile of palaces!" It is the last command,
And there, at broad Van Ness, the troops make their heroic stand.
The fight is now for life--sweet life, for helpless babe and homeless
wife--
The culmination of the strife spectacularly grand.

On sweeps the hurricane of fire. The fatal touch is given.
The detonation of the blast goes shrieking up to heaven.
The mansions of bonanza kings are tottering to their doom;
That swirling tide of fiery fate halts at the gaping tomb.
Beyond the cataclysm's brink, the multitude, too dazed to think,
Behold the red waves rise and--sink into the smoldering gloom.

V

The fire has swept the waterfront and burned the Mission down,
The business section--swallowed up, and wiped out Chinatown--
Full thirty thousand homes destroyed, Nob Hill in ashes lies,
And ghastly skeletons of steel on Market Street arise.
A gruesome picture everywhere! 'Tis desolation grim and bare
Waits artisan and millionaire beneath rank sulphurous skies.

To-night, within the city parks, famished, benumbed and mute,
Two hundred thousand refugees, homeless and destitute!
Upon the hard, cold ground they crouch--the wrecks of Pomp and Pride;
Milady and the city waifs are huddled side by side.
And there, 'neath shelter rude and frail, we hear the new-born infants
wail,
While' nation