After dinner with
Ellie to No. 24, where I left her, and then seeing a glow in the southern sky
over the roof of the Union Place Hotel, I started in pursuit of the fire. I
dog-trotted to Grand Street before I found it. A great tenement house in Elm
Street near Grand burning fiercely. Scores of families had been turned out of
it into the icy streets and bitter weather. Celtic and Teutonic fathers and
mothers were rushing about through the dense crowd in quest of missing
children. A quiet, respectable German was looking for his two (the elder
"was eight years old and could take care of himself, but the younger had
only nine months and couldn’t well do so”). I thought of poor little Johnny
frightened and unprotected in a strange scene of uproar and dark night and the
glare of conflagration and piercing cold, and of Babbins, and tried to help the
man but without success. There were stories current in the crowd of lives lost
in the burning house; some said thirty, others two. The latter statement
probably nearer the truth. Steam fire engines are a new element in our
conflagrations and an effective one, contributing to the tout ensemble a column
of smoke and sparks, and a low shuddering, throbbing bass note, more impressive
than the clank of the old-fashioned machines. . . .
There is a Speaker
at last. Sherman withdrew, and the Republicans elected Pennington of New Jersey
(Bill Pennington’s father), who seems a very fit man for the place. Reading
Agassiz’s Essay on Classification. Rather hard reading for anyone not thoroughly
learned in a score of -ologies. But I can see and appreciate its general scope
and hold it to be a very profound and valuable book.
SOURCE: Allan Nevins
and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong,
Vol. 3, p. 6
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