John R. Thompson's restaurant at 3 o'clock in the afternoon of the fatal day was an eating-house, decked here and there with late lunchers; at 3:20 it was a hospital, with the dead and dying stretched on the marble eating tables; at 4 o'clock it was a morgue, heaped with the dead; at 7:30 it was again a restaurant, but with chairs turned on top of the tables that had been the slabs of death, with the aisles cleared of the human debris, and the scrub woman at work mopping out the relics of human flesh, charred and as dust, and sweeping in pans the pieces of skulls that had lain about the mosaic floors, yet damp with the flowing length of woman's hair. The terror, the horror, the tragedies, the martyrdom, the piercing screams of the dying, the agonized groans, the excitement of the surging mob, the hurrying back and forth of the police with their burdens of death and life that only lasted a moment, the pushing of physicians, the casting of dead about on the floors like cord wood, one on top of the other, to make room on the marble slabs of tables for the oncoming living, the cries of children, the sobbing of persons recognizing their loved one dead, or worse than dead--this unutterable horror can never be imagined, and was never known before in Chicago, not excepting the horrors of the great fire, or the martyrdom of war. LIKE A FIELD OF BATTLE. The scene presented was most horrible. It was like a battlefield where the dead are being brought to the church or the residence that has at a moment's notice been turned into a hospital. In they came, the dead and the injured, at first at the rate of one every three minutes; then faster, several at a time, until the restaurant was heaped with maimed bodies lying on the tables or the floor, with surgeons bending over them, and on the cashier's counter, with the girl there sobbing with her face hidden in her hands, afraid to look at the ghastly spectacle. There were scores of physicians, three to each table, and they worked with vigor and earnestness and skill, but with the tears coursing down the cheeks of many a one. At first the bodies were carried into Thompson's, then they went across the street; many of them were put in ambulances and taken to the emergency room for women in Marshall Field's store, and still many others of the injured--those yet able to walk--were half dragged, half carried to the offices of physicians in the Masonic temple. WOMEN EAGER TO HELP. Women fought and shoved and pushed their way through the crowd to get to the door of the improvised hospital, that became a morgue only too rapidly. "I am a nurse. Let me help," said some. "I am a mother. My boy may be dead inside. For God's sake, let me save a life," said another, a woman in middle age. Others came in from the crowds, neither mothers nor nurses, women with the spirit of heroism who longed to serve humanity when humanity was at so low an ebb.