Hearts Afire - By J. D. Rawden Page 0,61

or more thoroughly consumed, owing to the intense heat from the inflammable stage fixtures.

The interior of the Adams Street Market presented at night a weirdly horrible sight. Disuse had made the place grimy. The gas fixtures had been removed, and candle light had to be used. The bodies were in rows that reached the entire length of the long apartment. On the breast of each was a lighted candle held in a small block of wood. Candles were also stuck on the hooks that had once been used to hang meat on, and lanterns helped to illuminate the spacious place; but the combined light was not sufficient to rid the corners of dark shadows. The bodies were in strained shapes, as though death had stopped them in a writhing struggle. Their arms were raised to their faces in most instances, the gesture suggesting suffocation or warding off heat. The charring made them appalling to look at. At an old counter officers added to lists the names of the few who were from time to time identified.

Articles taken from the bodies were in a basket, enveloped and numbered, and corresponding numbers were written on slips of paper and pinned to the rags that still clung to the corpses. Men and women passed from body to body, seeking friends or relatives, examining the bits of clothing, holding the candles close to the blackened faces, and looking for scars or other marks that might make recognition possible. They were wonderfully composed in manner, the only outbreaks of feeling being when a search was successful, and that was very rare. They were in the main of the poor class, such as occupy the galleries of theaters. They were persistent in their sad task, going along the rows of ill-shaped remains without missing a thing that promised identification. In several instances importunate appeals were made for permission to remove recognized remains, but the coroners decided not to grant that privilege until the next day.

On the next morning (December 7th) the confusion was less at the scene of the awful catastrophe, but the solemn gloom was deeper than before, the excitement was nearly as great, and the under-currents of sympathy more intense. There was a gloom in Brooklyn which could be felt even in the streets. There was but one topic of conversation. Men, women, and children thought and talked of little else than the Brooklyn Theater and the burned dead beneath its ruins. On the sidewalks, in the street cars, on the ferry-boats, there was one and the same subject of interest. In the neighborhood of the theater itself the excitement was at its height. But there was little to be seen that could either stimulate or gratify curiosity. Two or three undertaker’s wagons with the ugly coffins from the dead-house, were in attendance, but the uninterrupted procession of corpses, which was so horrible a feature of the scene on Wednesday, ended late at night, and on this morning there was nothing to see save the smoldering ruins of the theater. There was only the great void where the theater had stood, a mere rim of crumbling walls, scarcely breast high, enclosing immense heaps of brick and rubbish, from which columns of steam arose in the air.

A surging mass of people occupied the sidewalk in front of the dead-house, and stretched into the middle of the street, and men and boys clambered upon fences and wagons in the neighborhood, and gazed intently at the blank walls of the building. Policemen guarded the main entrance and the iron gateway before it. No permits for admission were demanded of those persons who could satisfy the officers that they had lost friends or relatives by the fire. They were allowed to enter from time to time, passing in the front door and through the room on the right-hand, which contained about thirty bodies, lying on the floor, none of them identified; so, through a smaller room at the further end of the building, back to the left-hand room, in which some of the corpses were lying upon marble slabs and tables in the center. Upon such bits of clothing as remained upon the bodies, numbers, written hastily with lead-pencils on bits of paper, had been pinned; and where a body had been recognized, the name and address were added to the number. Then, upon receipt of the coroner’s permission, the corpse was placed in a plain deal coffin and sent to the address given by the persons who