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I was rudely awakened from this reverie of wretchedness by the crowd which surged against me with a blind, unvindictive violence. My one desire was to get uptown to the woman I loved and had neglected, and I saw that every minute was adding to the difficulty.

How I reached the Brevoort House I do not know. But there I found a number of citizens who had not utterly lost their heads, and who had come together for counsel. There was a private wire in the house, and they were receiving intelligence from several central points in the city. The looks of these men, who were huddled into the parlor, were enough to dismay the most resolute observer. Their pale faces and painfully set mouths indicated the sense of an awful crisis which wisdom did not know how to meet or avoid. A well-known citizen read the dispatches to them as they were received, and torn as I was by impatience, my curiosity held me there to hear. It was now about half-past eleven in the morning. The rapidity with which events had moved since I got up was made startlingly apparent by the information here furnished. The authorities, together with a number of influential citizens, had come together as if by a common instinct at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The Mayor, the Police and Fire Commissioners, several wealthy bankers, and a number of prominent clergymen were holding some kind of council and sending out appeals for co-operation and addresses to the public, which latter were entirely unheeded. As I forced myself into the room I saw and heard a venerable and majestic gentleman, evidently a clergyman, addressing those present in an impassioned manner. There were tears in his eyes and an awful sadness in his voice. “Men and brethren,” he said, “it is appointed unto all men once to die. If it be appointed unto us who remain to die together, let us die like Christians who still retain our faith in eternal justice and eternal mercy, and not like wild beasts that devour each other.”

A report came that the fatal east wind was blowing. And at this there was a general movement of those present, as if the time were too short to waste in longer listening. I came up Lafayette Place to Astor Place with the intention of reaching Fourth Avenue. Both spaces were choked with people, and on Eighth Street I saw a woman on the steps of a private residence, wildly calling on the mob, which paid no attention to her, to repent, for the day of judgment was at hand. Her white hair was blown over her face and her arms were frantically gesticulating. Into the great hall of the Cooper Union a mass of religious people had flocked, and a number of speakers were making addresses and offering up prayers. When I passed the woman who was exhorting the crowd I had noticed the manner in which her hair, which was of soft, flossy white, streamed out straight in front of her, but it did not occur to me until I reached the square in front of the Cooper Union that this was caused by the peculiar and ominous draft of wind from the east of which I had heard so much, for it was there that I saw a crowd pointing up to the roof of the vast building known as the Bible House, which appeared to be covered with people. Some of them were holding flags and drapery, and the material floated out westward without any of the undulating motion which always marks a flag in a disturbed current. These extemporized pennants stood out as if they were starched. I could see that this sign produced a dumb sort of terror in the crowd. It seemed to me then that all emotion of which I was capable was centered in the one desire to get to the woman I loved and die with her. A crushing and at the same time an animating remorse, as if somehow I had been responsible for her death at least, in disregarding her warnings, and somehow doubly guilty in mistrusting her motives, unmanned me and inflamed me. It was with something of the same disregard of everybody but oneself that I had seen in others that I fought my way to Twenty-first Street. What brutalities I committed need not be recounted. That hour remains with me an acute and jangled memory of frenzy. I reached the steps of Judge Brisbane’s house torn and bleeding. The terrible scenes were in my eyes, and the dreadful, monotonous tumult of human desperation–that vast sigh of doomed humanity, pierced here and there by the wails and shrieks of despair and the cries of innocence for help, was in my ears. The celerity with which it had all come on left no chance for cool reason. An invisible phantom was at the heels of the community and we were part of a mighty stampede. After fumbling for an instant at the bell and pushing back several ghastly creatures who were on the steps, I must have applied my shoulder to the door and pushed it in. Some one appeared to be resisting on the other side, but it gave way and I half fell into Judge Brisbane’s vestibule. An instant later we were looking into each other’s faces, I, bloody and soiled and ragged and wild with the frenzy of fear and impatience; he, pale as death, but resolute, and holding an enormous bar over me.