The fire originated in a French hotel, and among the ashes of this house were found the remains of a human body. There was merely the head and trunk, the limbs being entirely burned off. It looked like a charred and blackened log of wood, but the contour of the head and figure was preserved; and it would be hard to conceive anything more painfully expressive of intense agony than the few lines which so powerfully indicated what had been the contorted position of the head, neck, and shoulders of the unfortunate man when he ceased to move. The coroner held an inquest as soon as he could raise a jury out of the crowd, and in the afternoon the body was followed to the grave by several hundred Frenchmen. This was the only death from the fire which was discovered at the time, but among the ruins of an adobe house, which for some reason was not rebuilt for several weeks afterwards, the remains of another body were found, and were never identified. As for living on that day, one had to do the best one could with raw materials. Every man had to attend to his own commissariat; and when it was time to think about dinner, I went foraging with a friend among the promiscuous heaps of merchandise, and succeeded in getting some boxes of sardines and a bottle of wine. We were also fortunate enough to find some hard bread, so we did not fare very badly; and at night we lay down on the bare hillside, and shared that vast apartment with two or three thousand fellow-lodgers. Happy was the man who had saved his blankets,--mine had gone as a small contribution to the general conflagration; but though the nights were agreeably cool, the want of a covering, even in the open air, was not a very great hardship. The next day the growth of the town was still more rapid. All sorts of temporary contrivances were erected by the storekeepers and hotel-keepers on the sites of their former houses. Every man was anxious to let the public see that he was “on hand,” and carrying on business as before. Sign-painters had been hard at work all night, and now huge signs on yard-wide strips of cotton cloth lined each side of the street, in many cases being merely laid upon the ground, where as yet nothing had been erected whereon to display them. These canvas and brush houses were only temporary. Every one, as soon as lumber could be procured, set to work to build a better house than the one he had lost; and within a month Sonora was in all respects a finer town than it had been before the fire. CHAPTER XXV THE DAY WE CELEBRATE On the 4th of July I went over to Columbia, four miles distant from Sonora, where there were to be great doings, as the latter place had hardly yet recovered from the effects of the fire, and was still in a state of transition. So Columbia, which was nearly as large a town, was to be the place of celebration for all the surrounding country.