it their business to look after the injured children whom they found in the streets, binding up their wounds with strips torn from their own turbans, and seeing that they were restored to their parents; and still others who generously threw open their doors to the half-naked fugitives; while more than one was seen to set an example of courage and indifference to the things of this world by seating himself upon a rug in front of his burning domicile, calmly smoking a narghileh, and only moving farther off as the flames advanced. But neither courage nor indifference, real or assumed, availed to check that fiery tempest. Now and then, with some temporary dying down of the wind, it would seem to abate a little of its fury, but not for long: the wind rising again with renewed violence, the flames, which had hardly begun to subside, would burst forth afresh, shooting out their sharp points like well-directed arrows, and accompanied by a deep, rumbling roar, broken from time to time by sharp explosions from the petroleum shops or gas in the dwellings, where the pipes were transformed into streams of molten lead; or when roofs would suddenly fall as though borne down by an avalanche; or a grove of cypress trees all at once begin to twist and writhe, and then burst into flame, sending down showers of burning resin; or some group of old wooden houses explode simultaneously like rockets, and emit such a fury of flame that it would seem as though the bellows of a thousand workshops were being turned upon them. It was a scene of ruin and wholesale destruction and disaster such as might result from fire, flood, earthquake, and the sacking of the city by a victorious army, all going on at once. No one had ever seen or imagined such horrors, and the effect upon the whole population was as though it had gone stark mad. In the streets of Pera the wildest confusion reigned, such noise and panic as are found on the deck of a vessel about to founder. There, in the midst of heaps of overturned furniture, beneath the flashing blades of the officers’ swords, the knocks and blows of porters and water-carriers, the hoofs of the pashas’ horses, gangs of firemen advancing at a dead run, overturning and treading down all they came in contact with,--were French, Italian, Greek, and Armenian families, rich and poor, old and young, men, women, and children, lost, distraught, groping blindly about in search of missing relatives, filling the air with shrieks and lamentations, choked with smoke and blinded with sparks; or a foreign ambassador followed by a troop of servants laden with books and valuable documents; or monks holding the crucifix aloft above the heads of the terrified throng; groups of Turkish women, their arms filled with costly objects from the harem; processions of men bending beneath the spoils of mosque and school, church or theatre; and from time to time a suffocating cloud of smoke, blown down by some