It had been nearly thirty hours since he had slept; and he found his eyes hot and dry and heavy in his head. Whether it was the smoke he had breathed, or the steady strain of the long night, or the lack of sleep and sheer fatigue, he did not know; but he found developing in his brain a strange, numb sense of remoteness, a want of coordination and identity between it and his body. In remembering this day, he was always afterwards to associate it with a smell of stale smoke in his nostrils and a vague dimness of sight. Even the thousand vivid incidents of the great conflagration were always to come back to him with this haunting sense of unreality, the feeling that it was not actually he but some one else who had witnessed and shared and lived through them--some one not alien, yet not wholly kin to himself. The gray and ochre smoke haze, and the diffused heat, and the sense of intimate danger long faced and hence grown hardly noted, clouded and filmed the facts, the colors, and the emotions of this day in the dim light of a dream. They were wild facts, too; great deeds; and glorious colors, which would have been worth a clearer recollection. The color of the midnight sky, its velvet blackness shot with crimson gleams. The waves of smoke, now like densest ink pouring up from some unseen funereal funnel--now blindingly white, flung like the plume of Navarre above the tumult of the fray. The tall, cold buildings standing almost defiantly in the winter air, lifting their immobile fronts to face the onrush--and the same buildings a little later, when the flames had passed, leaving only gnawed skeletons and heaped and smoldering ruins in their wake. The grim and terrible anguish of twisted steel girders that lay writhen like petrified snakes among the ashes, or lifted their tortured length to reach some last hold on sanity at the wall which they had once helped maintain. Great heaps and piles of ashes, and half-consumed beams and crushed and broken brick, lying in smoldering humility, punctuated by stray relics and remnants of an unburned world--pieces of furniture, by some miracle left unharmed, or bric-a-brac of some more than usual inanity. Fireproof buildings through which the flood of destruction had passed, burning all that was burnable, and leaving the gaunt frames naked in the air, their exteriors perhaps scorched and defaced, but with their vast strength unshaken and undismayed. The thousand sounds and odors of the fearful night and of the slow dawn; the fire whistles shrilling through the wintry air, the gongs on truck and cart adding their clangor to the mad mellay, the shouts of men, the bawling of orders, the screams of frightened women, the uncanny sound of the mewing of an imprisoned cat in a window, whose instinct told it what its sense could not. The hammer of horses' hoofs on the stones of the street, with the sparks flung out to left and right beneath the flying feet; the steady