Before dark I was excused from duty and walked through the five or more miles of ruins to my previous night’s refuge. Preparations to leave were being made by all the people who had not already gone. Two of us before midnight came down to the Chicago and North Western Railway station at Wells and Kinzie Streets. It was an eerie walk down Lincoln Avenue to Wells, thence south to the station, over three miles. The night was pitch dark. Most of the distance on Wells Street south of Wisconsin Street had been built up with frame cottages. The street was several feet above the natural surface of the lots. The owners had laid in their winter’s supply of anthracite, then substantially the only coal used for domestic heating and cooking. Each of those coal piles had taken fire and was burning. There were many hundreds of them. The intense blackness of the night, the heat from the burning coal, the blue flames now bursting into little spurts of red, the crackling of the coal as lumps were splitting up, the unexpected glare of a sudden high spurt of red fire, the complete silence except the noises referred to, the absence of any other human beings in the entire distance traversed, made a nearly speechless walk as well as a fearful one, and I, at least, had the feeling that the fires of hell were about us and the imps of Satan waiting amidst them for unwary victims. Could Dante have experienced such a night he might have added further terrors to his Inferno. Our relief was intense when we boarded the train for a nearby suburban town, and as fire sufferers were given a free ride. The next morning found me back at my temporary desk with old Chicago only a memory, but with high hopes for the new and greater Chicago which every ambitious young man was already convinced would surely rise out of the ashes of the old one. Looking backward over the past half century, we see that those hopes have been more than justified, and that the city of today with its motto, “I Will,” exceeds in accomplishments the visions of its then most enthusiastic prophets of future greatness. FRANK J. LOESCH 10 South La Salle Street, Chicago, October 12, 1925. FOOTNOTE: [1] Read before The Chicago Literary Club, Oct. 12, 1925.