While I waited there feeling like a shipwrecked sailor on a drifting sea one of my fellow editors, Allan Dunn, hove in sight. I hailed him. He threw me a line, as it were, and towed me up to his house on the top of Hyde street hill. Mrs. Dunn was walking up and down in front of the house clad in her best tailor suit, her pretty new opera cloak on her arm. We went inside and burned up all the gas left in the pipes making coffee.

A slight temblor sent us helter-skelter into the street where the crowd going toward the fire caught us up and whirled us along to the top of the hill on Sacramento street. The fire was roaring over an immense territory. We wanted to get into the thick of things and went on down to Union Square. It was full of refugees sitting on their household goods. There were gathered Chinamen, Italians, “muckers” from the south of Market street, Grand Opera singers; painted women who blinked as though they had not seen daylight for months; and fashionable people in evening dress donned hurriedly where they were awakened by the earthquake — a succotash of civilizations — I didn’t see any policemen. There was no need of any — the crowd was perfectly quiet — it was this unearthly, unnatural calm which made me afraid to speak. I saw only one talkative person. She was a beautiful creature of stunning style who walked between two men, her hands in her muff. I believe she was the only woman in all San Francisco that day who acted unconcerned. As the trio sailed past me I heard her say “O, we’ll have a good time as long as our money lasts.”

As we stopped on Stockton street to watch a toppling wall I found myself next to an old colored man. As he spoke I recognized in him the negro exhorter. I had sometimes listened when he was holding forth from his open-air platforms. Now he was exclaiming:

“Haven’t I prophesied all this? Haven’t I told you this wicked town would be consumed with fire and brimstone?” But now I’m sorry I spoke.”

At the Sequoia Club we rescued Mrs. Solly Walter. Later she and I detached ourselves from the Dunns and walked back to my house. The residence streets looked like circus day in a country village. The women were all sitting on chairs in their front yards, secure in the feeling that Van Ness avenue was too wide for fire to cross it. By noon today both sides of the wide boulevard were lined with people and furniture. Sometimes a woman would have saved only one easy chair and was comfortably rocking in it. Again it was a bedroom set that had been snatched from the burning — but always there were phonographs and parrots and dogs and canary birds. Here, as everywhere, the crowd showed no emotion, except when the earth trembled, as it did now and then, slightly. Then everyone would rush for the middle of the street.

This afternoon my old friend Mr. Whitney called for me with a buggy. We made a complete circuit of the fire zone. The people seem to feel that a power too stupendous to combat had taken charge of their destiny, and that the fury of the forces of nature cannot be met by the puny hands of man. We are all learning the lesson of the inevitable.

The open lot near my house is full of people and new comers are constantly arriving. The pillar of fire mounts higher and higher. The heavens south are burning red, while north over Fort Mason smoke hangs low. It frightens me, the smoke, even more than the fire. It is an unreasonable fear I know, and I'm ashamed to tell anyone of it — the fear that the heavens will fall — the sky looks so near. What if we should get caught up in a maelstrom of smoke and only four blocks off unstable earth between us and the bay!

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