On Dearborn Street not more than two hundred feet north of my late boarding place, we saw a gruesome sight. Only a day or two before the fire the son of the owner of a residence had recovered from an attack of typhoid and the tan bark had been removed from the street. The body we saw, as we learned afterwards, was the father of the sick boy. With a blind fatalism which can not be explained, after the man had gotten his son and family to a place of safety he had returned to the house determined to save it. To that end he got out the garden hose, wound it about his body and turning on the water undertook to put out burning brands as they fell, until a whirlwind of fire burned him to death. His right hand held the nozzle. The marks of the hose burned off were plainly discernable over his back as he lay on his face burned to a crisp. Of my former boarding place nothing was left, even the bricks having largely been pulverized by the heat, and buried treasure of silverware was afterwards found melted to a shapeless mass. I met there our next door neighbor’s wife. They owned their home. She had lost eyebrows and eyelashes and her hair was singed. Her story was a strange one. Her husband was downtown trying to save what he could out of his Sherman House Barber Shop. With the fire drawing near, she felt that her canary bird would lose its life when exposed to the great heat, if she undertook to carry it with her. She therefore decided to remain in the house and be burned up with it and her canary. At the last moment as she saw the flames a few doors away, her courage failed and with a heavy wrap, without a hat, she dashed out, to find herself almost stifled by the intense heat, and could barely get around the corner without being suffocated. She was unaware of the loss of her hair until told of it by friends whom she found after hours of wandering northward. As the bridges across the river had all been burned, I made for the La Salle Street tunnel, only to find that the foot passageway was impassable because the flaming brands which had been swept into the south entrance at Lake Street had set fire to the board walk which was wholly consumed. The brick walls of business buildings on both sides of La Salle Street north of Kinzie Street had fallen outward into the open space of the tunnel driveway. I joined a number of men who were making their way slowly over the debris of still heated bricks into the unlit tunnel through the Cimmerian darkness to daylight at Randolph Street.