Chicago had no Sunday theaters, and for amusement one had to resort to the German beer gardens or to the North Side Turner Hall, where good music was the rule afternoons and evenings. Therefore church attendance was much more general than it is now. I would say that Chicago was then a City of Churches. I attended many services in different churches and often found standing room at a premium on Sunday evenings. As churchgoers were coming out of their places of worship on Sunday evening, fire bells were ringing furiously and a rapidly increasing red glare towards the Southwest Side indicated that another fire had broken out. A strong hot wind had been blowing from the southwest during the day and it seemed to have gained in strength at this time. Few of our fellows at the boarding house cared to see another fire after being up most of Saturday night at the one just referred to. Therefore only two of us started out for the scene of the new fire. My companion was young LeRow, somewhat undersized, but exceedingly active. His enthusiasm to see the new blaze carried me with him. We made our way speedily to about Franklin and Monroe Streets. The fire had just leaped across the South Branch at about Adams Street. In that vicinity was located the gas reservoir which supplied the South and North Sides with illuminating gas. All about that neighborhood were many small cottages inhabitated mostly by Irish people. The destruction of their homes was an immediate certainty. The possible explosion of the gas tank could not be long deferred. The frantic excitement among the people in their fear that they could not save their household goods was most moving. With a sympathy but a heedlessness which neither of us could afterwards account for, in the imminent dangers about us, we helped as we could to move their goods into the street. They had better have been left in the cottages for almost as they were being placed in the street some began to smoke from the heat of the air. The panic which paralyzes human faculties under conditions like that is illustrated by one instance. From one of the cottages a mother had carried into the street, of all things, a bed tick filled with straw, where burning brands were everywhere falling in increasing numbers, and rushing back brought out and dumped a pair of twin infants upon the straw tick and hastened back into her home just as LeRow and I dropped some household articles and noticed a burning brand fall into the straw tick. He grabbed one infant and I the other. We gave the babes to their frantic mother, urging her to run with them for their lives. As we started to run we noticed the straw tick ablaze. No houses had then begun to burn but most of the people joined us in getting away.