Read "The Burning of Chelsea" by Walter Merriam Pratt online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
No set of men ever worked harder than the firemen. They put up as gallant a fight as was ever fought on a battlefield. Old men, who had spent their lives fighting the flames, admitted that it was the hottest fire that they had ever seen. No amount of apparatus could have stopped it after the second fire had got started. The way the gale swept the flames along was beyond comprehension.
The Chelsea firemen had been kept constantly on the jump for two years previous to the fire in the performance of their duties, and when this fire started they, like other citizens, thought it would be extinguished, as many others had been in that district, without much loss, but the second fire changed everything.