From toppling ruins whence the floors were stripped, iron safes hung in their crannies, their warped doors having long since betrayed the guarded records and securities to destruction. Incessant salvos of thunder shook the air, as walls fell in mountain-slides and sent up new flurries of smoke and flame. Poking about wherever the ashes were cool enough, were beggars and thieves and harrowed owners. Little boys and girls and drunken hags from the slums paraded in lace and silk. Cavalry and infantry and marines went here and there, trying to drive back the dishonest, and to distinguish between the owners of the ruins and those who merely hoped to steal a profit from the disaster. Caravans of weary cart-horses staggered drunkenly out of the fallen city, dragging forth dripping wains of merchandise. Dog-tired firemen were returning to their engine-houses for rest, and RoBards felt that he was a shirker. Before long he restored Patty to her home and returned to duty, warmed by her farewell embrace and the dewy rose of a perfect kiss. For thirty-six hours the fire blazed on before the exhausted New York and Newark firemen and the four hundred Philadelphian reinforcements determined its final boundaries at the wall of exploded buildings. It had been confined at last to the business district and few important homes were touched. But forty-five crowded acres, the richest forty-five acres on this side of the ocean, had been reduced to rubbish. Seventeen million dollars had gone up in smoke and spark. All of the old Dutch realm that had survived the fires of ’76 and ’78 had been consumed forever. New York had no longer any visible antiquity. Henceforth it was mere American. A fortnight later, when Christmas had passed, the black Brocken was still a sight that drew visitors from the countrysides about. People from Long Island forgot to hunt deer in the wilds there, and came over to stare at the little plumes of smoke that wavered above the jumbled prairie. For weeks there was an all-night sunset above Manhatto’s isle. After the gigantic debauch of fire came the long days of penalty-paying. The merchants turned to the insurance companies to reimburse their losses. The insurance companies were overwhelmed by the catastrophe. Not one of them could pay ten cents on the dollar. For a time it seemed that all of them must go into one general bankruptcy. But first they called upon their stockholders with disastrous assessments. Three old-maid cousins of Patty’s were assessed five thousand dollars on account of their stocks, and came to her father’s house weeping to find themselves stripped to poverty. Being respectably bred women, they had no recourse but the charity of relatives. They could not work, of course. But old Jessamine met them with a face of abjection. He was a pauper likewise, and in his own destruction he foresaw a general collapse.