Closely following the sad echoes of the distress of sufferers who had been rendered houseless, homeless, penniless, by the terrible fires in San Francisco and Baltimore, Chelsea, a handsome city and suburb of New England's metropolis, was visited by a devastating conflagration, which for severity, character, and destructiveness finds its parallel only in the crushing disasters of New York in 1835, Chicago in 1871, and San Francisco in 1906. The residents and merchants, who were located upon the pretty and substantial streets which have risen through years of toil by slow yet steady advancement, have all shared the common fate contingent upon this dread catastrophe. All have the same melancholy tale to tell,—" We have been burned out."

On Sunday morning, April 12, when thousands of the inhabitants of Chelsea arose, to enjoy the quiet and rest anticipated at the end of their six days' toil. little, indeed, was their thought that ere that day's sun should set their business blocks of granite, brick, and iron, and their costly and comfortable homes, their hospitals, schools, city buildings, banks, churches, post-office, and State Armory, would be a mass of smoking cinders, ashes, and ruin. But the fire-fiend was abroad again, and most mercilessly did he wield his powers for destruction through scores of closely builded streets, and before nightfall millions of dollars worth of handsome buildings, with their merchandise and personal property, had been devoured by the frightful element of fire, which raged without check so continuously throughout that fatal "Sabbath Day."

From a business view the loss, Heaven knows, was heavy enough, but the individual distress and complete loss among families and the poor of the city was heart-rending in the extreme; and years must elapse before many of the sufferers can, in the ordinary course of events, recover from the dreadful effects of that wholesale work of the Fire King. Whole blocks of brick and iron melted away before the raging fury of the dreaded element, and stately residences fell one after another, like so many paper structures, when the fire fairly got under way. Everything that human effort could do to check or stop it in its lightning-like course of devastation proved for hours unavailing, and only when an army of firemen with their apparatus from surrounding cities and towns was concentrated against the fire did anything effective appear to arrest the progress of the rushing flames, which devoured alike new and old buildings in its track of merciless destruction.

The fire started about 11 A.M. in one of the buildings of the Boston Blacking Works, off Summer Street, near the Everett line, and so rapidly did the flames travel that it seemed as if three or four fires broke out simultaneously and close together. The entire fire department responded with splendid promptness, and in a remarkably short time a score of streams were pouring on the burning buildings, but, unfortunately, a high wind was blowing, and with the roaring wind, helped by the mass of flames, the conflagration began in hearty earnest. The entire city seemed doomed, and before night an area of buildings a mile and a half long and two-thirds of a mile wide at the greatest breadth had gone under. The writer was present during part of the afternoon and evening, and saw the fire leap along and across streets, without a halt or apparent impediment in its rapid pathway of ruin, so terrific was its start, fanned by the seemingly relent less wind. Everything in the path of that rush of fire was consumed, and no ocular proof determined what business was pursued above this, that, or the other particular ruin. The heat was simply unbearable. None knew it better than the firemen, resident and volunteer, who persistently battled the fiery fiend all day long and until long after Sunday's sun had set.

Continued