safer parts of the city. Hardly had the last of the injured been carried
through the door when the roof was seen to be in a blaze, and shortly
afterward the whole building burst into a whirlwind of flame.

At midnight the fire was raging and roaring with unslacked rage, and at
dawn of Thursday its fury was undiminished. The work of destruction
was already immense. In much of the Hayes Valley district, south of
McAllister and north of Market Street, the destruction was complete.
From the Mechanics' Pavilion and St. Nicholas Hotel opposite down to
Oakland Ferry the journey was heartrending, the scene appalling. On each
side was ruin, nothing but ruin, and hillocks of masonry and heaps of
rubbish of every description filled to its middle the city's greatest
thoroughfare.

Across an alley from the Post Office stood the Grant Building, one of
the headquarters of the army. Of this only the smoke-darkened walls were
left. On Market Street opposite this building the beautiful front of
the Hibernian Savings Bank, the favorite institution of the middle and
poorer classes, presented a hideous aspect of ruin. At eleven o'clock
of Wednesday night the north side of Market Street stood untouched, and
hopes were entertained that the great Flood, Crocker, Phelan and other
buildings would be spared, but the hunger of the fire fiend was not yet
satiated, and the following day these proud structures had only their
blackened ruins to show. On both sides of Market Street, down to the
ferry, the tale was the same. The handsome and gigantic St. Francis
Hotel, on Powell Street, fronting on Union Square, was left a ruined
shell. This was one of the lofty steel structures that bore unharmed the
earthquake shock, but quickly succumbed to the flames. Among the other
skyscrapers north of Market Street that perished were the fourteen-story
Merchants' Exchange, and the great Mills Building, occupying almost an