As the helpless creatures lay there in that fearful jam, at the only available exit in the front of the house, the smoke, and flame, and noxious gases were drawn irresistibly to that same door. They too, sought an exit at the front, and found only that death trap. The draught must have been fierce, the flames like a breath from hell. While the still breathing, palpitating mass of crushed and bruised humanity lay there imprisoned, the smoke and gases were sucked through the door into the foyer, diffusing themselves through the writhing human hecatomb, and giving those not yet dead a painless _coup de grace_. How soon it must have been over! How useless the emotions that shook my very soul as I gazed upon the slaughtered ones. And how solacing the conclusions with which calm retrospection has replaced the horrible immediate impressions of the scene itself. Merciful indeed, the smoke and those noxious gases, especially for those luckless ones who lay on the top of the pile of victims. These were scorched and burned--not badly, but enough to show that with the death-dealing smoke and gases the flames came also. A fearful gust or two--perhaps only one, and the work was done. And the scene at the open door of death was but a fragment of the frightful holocaust. Death’s barbecue lay behind that heap of bodies. Towering up behind that other front door which would not open, were scores of blackened bodies, some burned and distorted out of all semblance to their living form. Still others sat upright where Death had surprised them. They died in their seats without resistance, overcome doubtless, by the deadly gases. There, standing erect, like soldiers, packed like sardines, on a stair case behind a locked iron gate, was row on row of dead, who had lost their lives trying to escape from the gallery to join the panic-stricken ones in the lower balcony. Hopeless effort--what matter where they died? As well meet death face to face, there upon that inner stair behind that merciless trap gate, as in that pile upon the landing--perhaps better, who knows? Over yonder is an “exit,” one of many similar delusions. This one leads into a blind hallway. Here again, stand the dead bodies of unfortunate beings who died fighting for life against invincible odds. Scattered about in the aisles between the balcony rail and the death trap “exits”--oh, the mockery of the word!--lay bodies burned to a cinder. Among them lay the body of a noble youth, the son of one of my friends, whose life was so full of promise, so replete with possible future usefulness, so suggestive of future greatness even, that I do not wonder the father was crushed to the earth. I loved the lad, and if, deep down, my friend’s grief were tinged with resentment against the ordering of things, I could understand and sympathize.