And now the servants of the water demon, the firemen, dismayed and excited, fall back a pace, only to return and with the strength of water at their command assail the power of the fire again. Streams of water are now spouting from a score of nozzles. A group of eight firemen, guided by a rotund battalion chief who is speaking through a trumpet, ascends the steps of a nearby doorway and gropes its way through the dark halls to apartments where frightened human beings may be cowering, too crazed by fear to undertake to rescue themselves. Another group of eight is to be seen working its way with scaling ladders to the roof of another building. They carry ropes which they hang over the eaves, thus constructing a means of egress for those who are willing and hardy enough to lay hold and descend in this fashion. Still another group of eight is spreading a net into which hovering, fear-crazed victims calling from windows above are commanded to jump. Through it all the regular puffing of the engines, the muffled voices of the captains shouting, and the rattling beat of the water as it plays upon the walls and batters its way through the windows and doors, can be heard as a monotone, the chorus of this grand contest in which man seeks for mastery over an element. And yet the fire continues to burn. It catches a dressmaker who has occupied the rear rooms of the third floor of the building, two doors away from that of the paint-dealer’s shop, and while she is still waving frantically for aid she is enveloped with a glorious golden shroud of fire which hides her completely. It rushes to where a lame flower-maker, Ziltman, is groping agonizedly before his windows on the fifth floor of another tenement, and sends into his nostrils a volume of thick smoke which smothers him entirely. It sends long streamers of flame licking about doorposts and window frames of still other buildings, filling stairways and area-landings with great dark clouds of vapor and bursting forth in lurid, sinister flashes from nooks and corners where up to now fire has not been suspected. It appears to be an all-devouring Nemesis, feeding as a hungry lion upon this ruck of wooden provender and this wealth of human life. The bodies of stricken human beings are but fuel for it--but small additions to its spirals of smoke and its tongues of flame.