THE VALPARAISO FIRE.

THE VALPARAISO FIRE.

地震时在瓦尔帕莱索,智利,那里were eighteen distinct shocks in two and one-half hours and all that time the fires kept increasing so rapidly as to cause the terrors of the one to be forgotten in those of the other. The flames (says one writer) “became the threatening feature of the scene. It was awful. On one hill above us there were two fires, in the ‘Port’ two, and towards the ‘Almendral’ I counted thirteen distinct conflagrations. The whole town was illumined, and through the smoke of the nearer fires the more distant ones appeared red and lurid. A handful of the Eleventh company went down and as the water supply failed, opened a sewer, drew from it, stopping to clear the receiver and then beginning again, in their struggle to prevent the fire coming toward the narrow strip of town below our jutting promontory. The nearest fire downtown was in Calle Blanco, which, after consuming the German and American consulates. came along destroying Besa’s, Cariola’s, etc. When we actually felt the heat of the burning buildings and, one after another, the somke began to roll from adjoining buildings and then hurst into a mass of flame, with the accompanying musketry of creaking, corrugated iron plates and cartridge stores, the dull booms and explosions of barrels of turpentine, lubricating oils, etc., the falling in of roofs and Vails, I became anxious lest we might be surrounded by fire. These fires were imposing and continually drew us across the brickstrcwn patio, to stand and watch their devouring fury and awesome glare * * * There is scarcely a house in the whole city that has not suffered, and certainly require some repairs, and probably seventy-five one-hundredths extensive ones. That gives an idea of the universality of the castastrophe, and still more so, if T add that probably fifty one-luindredths of the houses and buildings are burned (a real stiff shake), utterly destroyed or uninhabitable. At first, on my horse one could only go to the Almendral by the centre of the Avenida Brazil, where there were, of course, no buildings to fall; and for blocks and blocks buildings had been gutted by fire, or were a mass of ruins. The Victoria theatre had just crumbled—police court was a tumbled down, hopeless wreck—big palatial buildings all the way along, with fronts down, or whole sections cut off; but the side views down the transverse streets wakened in imagination such borrows that tears welled to one’s eyes. They were covered with debris of tumbled down walls and sections of roofs to a depth of five or six feet, and showed oftentimes not an inch of soace uncovered. Throughout that section of the Almendral from Plaza Victoria to halfway between Puente Jaime and Delicias. it looks as if those who madly fled from their buildings and dropped on their knees in the street to cry ‘Misericordia, misericordia,’ with their uplifted eyes must have only lived to see death tumbling down upon them.”

一场灾难性的大火席卷了C的小镇heeotap. T. T.. twenty miles south of Muskogee, where the nearest fire department is. Mrs. Strother, a milliner, was burned to death in her home. The loss is believed to be heavy; twelve frame buildings, with all their contents, have been destroyed.