After that came a kindly blank.  I knew nothing, saw nothing, merely tottered on in my quest for safety.  My next nightmare vision was a quiet street of the dead.  I came upon it abruptly, as a wanderer in the country would come upon a flowing stream.  Only this stream I gazed upon did not flow.  It was congealed in death.  From pavement to pavement, and covering the sidewalks, it lay there, spread out quite evenly, with only here and there a lump or mound of bodies to break the surface.  Poor driven people of the abyss, hunted helots—­they lay there as the rabbits in California after a drive.* Up the street and down I looked.  There was no movement, no sound.  The quiet buildings looked down upon the scene from their many windows.  And once, and once only, I saw an arm that moved in that dead stream.  I swear I saw it move, with a strange writhing gesture of agony, and with it lifted a head, gory with nameless horror, that gibbered at me and then lay down again and moved no more.

* In those days, so sparsely populated was the land that wild animals often became pests.  In California the custom of rabbit-driving obtained.  On a given day all the farmers in a locality would assemble and sweep across the country in converging lines, driving the rabbits by scores of thousands into a prepared enclosure, where they were clubbed to death by men and boys.

I remember another street, with quiet buildings on either side, and the panic that smote me into consciousness as again I saw the people of the abyss, but this time in a stream that flowed and came on.  And then I saw there was nothing to fear.  The stream moved slowly, while from it arose groans and lamentations, cursings, babblings of senility, hysteria, and insanity; for these were the very young and the very old, the feeble and the sick, the helpless and the hopeless, all the wreckage of the ghetto.  The burning of the great ghetto on the South Side had driven them forth into the inferno of the street-fighting, and whither they wended and whatever became of them I did not know and never learned.*

* It was long a question of debate, whether the burning of the South Side ghetto was accidental, or whether it was done by the Mercenaries; but it is definitely settled now that the ghetto was fired by the Mercenaries under orders from their chiefs.

I have faint memories of breaking a window and hiding in some shop to escape a street mob that was pursued by soldiers.  Also, a bomb burst near me, once, in some still street, where, look as I would, up and down, I could see no human being.  But my next sharp recollection begins with the crack of a rifle and an abrupt becoming aware that I am being fired at by a soldier in an automobile.  The shot missed, and the next moment I was screaming and motioning the signals.  My memory of riding in the automobile is very hazy, though this ride, in turn, is broken by one vivid picture.  The crack of the rifle of the soldier sitting beside me made me open my eyes, and I saw George Milford, whom I had known in the Pell Street days, sinking slowly down to the sidewalk.  Even as he sank the soldier fired again, and Milford doubled in, then flung his body out, and fell sprawling.  The soldier chuckled, and the automobile sped on.