Possibly no fire of modern times has received as much publicity as the one which swept over Chicago on Sunday night, October the 8th, 1871, and the following day. Exactly who was responsible for starting the fire is a matter of conjecture, but until about a dozen years ago it was generally believed that an obstreperous cow, belonging to a certain Mrs. O’Leary, was the culprit. Now cows in history, from the time of the Golden Calf, have oftener been infamous than otherwise, and Mrs. O’Leary’s had been no exception until Michael Ahern, reporter for the _Chicago Tribune_, who had “covered” the fire at the time and had known Mrs. O’Leary well, by publishing the real facts in 1921, removed the stigma of fifty years memory and restored her bovine ladyship to her rightful place in the annals of cowdom. To be sure, Mrs. O’Leary had a cow; in fact she had five of them. She was a truthful woman, and a few days after the fire, while her movements on that memorable Sunday night were still fresh in her memory, she branded the cow story as a fabrication, and positively disproved it by the testimony of a neighbor who discovered the fire in Mrs. O’Leary’s cowshed, after she and her family had retired. Ahern’s story runs: “There was a social gathering in the neighborhood that night in honor of the arrival of a young man from Ireland. One of those present told me in after years that two women of the party went to the O’Leary shed to get some milk for punch. One woman held a lighted lamp while the other milked the cow. They thought they heard someone coming, and in their haste to escape, the lamp was dropped, setting fire to the place. This, I believe, was the true cause of the fire.” Thomas D. Foster, whose story of the Great Fire is here published for the first time, was a young man of twenty-four when he arrived in Chicago, from London, Canada, in September, 1871, for the purpose of establishing a packing plant for John Morrell & Co. Ltd., of Liverpool, by whom he was employed. The down town offices of the firm had just been opened in the building situated on the southwest corner of Clark and Washington streets; this fell a prey to the flames and was entirely consumed. A small packing house, located at Archer Avenue and Quarry Street, had been leased from the owner, and this was not harmed; and although the fire delayed the beginning, packing operations were actively carried on during the winter of 1871-2.