Fires in Chicago attended with loss of life have been of increasing frequency in the past few years. Fire in the Henning & Speed building on Dearborn street, in 1900, caused four girls to lose their lives. Since it and before the Iroquois disaster have come: The St. Luke Sanitarium horror, 10 lives lost, 43 injured; the Doremus laundry explosion, 8 lives lost; the American Glucose Sugar refinery blaze, 8 killed; Northwestern railroad boiler explosion, 8 killed, Stock Yards boiler explosion, 18 killed, and about a year ago the Lincoln hotel fire, 14 visiting stockmen suffocated. In view of this terrible array of suffering and death, it would seem that no precaution could be too great to avert future calamities. But although human life is beyond price, it is probable that the world at large will move on very much in the same old way--an arousing and an upheaval of public sentiment for a time after the burned and maimed have been laid away, and then a gradual return of carelessness. It would seem impossible, however, that the United States could forget for many generations the Iroquois disaster, and that it must result in a final reform of all arrangements looking to the safety of theater goers. CHAPTER XIV. STORIES AND NARRATIVES OF THE HOLOCAUST. From two women who sat within a few feet of the stage when the fire broke out in the theater, and who remained calm enough to observe the actual beginning of the holocaust, there came one of the most thrilling and significant stories of that afternoon of panic. Mrs. Emma Schweitzler and Mrs. Eva Katherine Clapp Gibson, of Chicago, were the two women who told this story. They occupied seats in the fifth row of the orchestra circle. Mrs. Schweitzler was the last woman to walk out unassisted from the first floor. Mrs. Gibson was carried out badly burned. "The curtain that was run down," said Mrs. Schweitzler, "was the regular drop curtain painted with the 'autumn scene,' It was the same curtain that was lowered before the show started and the same one used during the interval following the first act. No other curtain was lowered. "As soon as the drop curtain came down it caught fire. A hole appeared at the left hand side. Then the blaze spread rapidly, and instantly a great blast of hot air came from the stage through the hole in the curtain and into the audience. Big pieces of the curtain were loosened by the terrific rush of air and were blown into the people's faces. Scores of women and children must have been burned to death by these fragments of burning grease and paint. I was in the theater until the curtain had entirely burned. It went up in the flames as if it had been paper, and did more damage than good." "So far as could be observed from the audience, the asbestos curtain was not lowered at all," said Mrs. Schweitzler. "I was particularly interested in that 'autumn-scene' curtain because I paint oil pictures myself.