Here, perhaps, in the early hours of the conflagration, you might have seen a group of three men at the corner of a street working a hand-squirt. This instrument was of brass, and measured about 3 feet long. Two men held it by a handle on each side; and when the nozzle had been dipped into a bucket or a cistern near, and the water had flowed in, they would raise the squirt, while the third man pushed up the piston to discharge the water. The squirt might hold about four quarts of water. [Illustration: A CITY FIRE TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO.] If one man worked the squirt, he would hold it up by the handles, and push the end of the piston, which was generally guarded by a button, against his chest. But, at the best, it is obvious that the hand-squirt was a very inadequate contrivance. Not far distant you might also have seen a similar squirt, mounted in a wheeled reservoir or cistern, the pistons, perhaps, worked by levers; and, possibly, in yet another street you might have noticed a pump of some kind, also working in a cistern; while here and there you might have come upon lines of persons passing buckets from hand to hand, bringing water either from the wells in the city, or from the river, or actually throwing water on the fire. Such were the appliances which we gather were then used for extinguishing fires. But such contrivances as were then in the neighbourhood of Fish Street Hill appear to have been burnt before they could be used, and the people seem to have been too paralyzed with terror to have attempted any efforts. The suggestion was made to pull down houses, so as to create gaps over which the fire could not pass; and this suggestion no doubt indicates one of the methods of former days. But the method was not at first successful on this occasion. Thus, Pepys, in his Diary, tells us, under date of the Sunday: "At last [I] met my Lord Mayor in Canning Street, like a man spent, with a handkercher about his neck. To the King's message [to pull down houses before the fire] he cried, like a fainting woman, 'Lord! what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses; but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.'" This is a graphic little picture of the bewilderment of the people; and Pepys goes on to say that, as he walked home, he saw "people all almost distracted, and no manner of means used to quench the fire." [Illustration: THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON (FROM A CONTEMPORARY PRINT).] In a similar manner, another famous eye-witness, John Evelyn, notes in his Diary that "some stout seamen proposed, early enough to have saved nearly the whole city," the destruction of houses to make a wide gap; "but this some tenacious and avaricious men, aldermen, etc., would not permit, because their houses must have been of the first."