first. Sparks no longer fell on them. The flames were going straight up. By one o'clock these roaring columns, pillaring the sky, were all leaning toward Edgewater. Yes, a breeze, an unmistakable breeze was bearing down from the northwest. Gentle enough at first, when it encountered all this vast whirl of heated air, the breeze quickened freakishly into a gale, a devastating blast that had breathed but once upon that blazing waterfront of Edgewater when from it there surged toward the town a mile-long billow of flame. Frightfully this rolled into the wide avenue and scorched the cheeks of spectators so that the line of them broke and gave up the cross-streets in hurrying groups. Proud, as vaunting itself on this victory, it leaped and flaunted after their heels.
Immediately, the sides of wooden buildings and the window casings of brick ones on the town side of Inlet Avenue, commenced to smoke and blister. Within a minute incipient blazes broke out along that barrier of buildings—a score of blazes, fifty of them! Stores, shops, flats and homes of Edgewater were breaking into flame.
Fire! Fire! The town was kindling as that first warehouse had kindled, with incredible rapidity. Fires by squads and fires by platoons were organizing themselves in one long regimentall front of flame. Tardily the little fire department, totally disorganized by the mob, was endeavoring to function, rushing to and fro with a thousand volunteer aids—regulars on the roofs of stores with hose, volunteers on the roofs of houses with buckets and wet sacks. Their efforts were futile, comic. This wall of flame, advancing remorseless and irresistible from the waterfront, was dooming
