The request was generally followed, and on that mournful day the interment of the victims of the holocaust began, filling the streets with processions moving to the grave. From daybreak until evening funeral corteges moved through the streets. Church bells at noon tolled a requiem. The machinery of business was hushed in the downtown district, and long lines of carriages, preceded by hearses or plain black wagons, followed the theater victims to the grave.
In no public place, in no home was the grief of the bereft not felt. Many of the dead were taken directly from the undertaking rooms to the cemeteries and buried with simple ceremony. Before dark nearly 200 victims were borne to the grave. A score were taken to railroad stations, to be followed by the mourning back to their homes.
BUSINESS WORLD IN MOURNING.
The board of trade closed at 11 o'clock. The doors of the stock exchange were not opened. Few of the downtown mercantile houses and few of the offices were open after noon. There was little business.
It was a day of mourning, and the army of the sorrowful that for days had searched for its dead performed the last rites. At noon bells in all the church towers were rung to the rhythm of "The Dead March in Saul." Those who heard the solemn dirge stood still for the space of five minutes with bared heads. The proclamation of the mayor generally was observed. Everywhere there was gloom and no one could escape from the pall that enshrouded Chicago.
The demand for hearses was so great that the undertakers were compelled to make up schedules in which the different hours of the day were allotted to the grief-stricken.
Flags were at half-mast, while white hearses bearing the bodies of children and black hearses with the bodies of others took their way to the various churches. In some blocks three and four hearses were standing, and at the churches one cortege would wait until another moved away.
The pall seemed to pervade the air itself. Pedestrians halted on the sidewalk, and in the cold stood with bared heads while the funeral processions passed.
Children saw their parents laid away; parents followed the coffins of their child. Students just reaching manhood or womanhood were laid at rest, while relatives and companions mourned. Kindly clergymen wept as they spoke words of comfort to those bereft of father, mother, brother, sister, or even of all.
Two double funerals passed through the downtown districts just as the department stores were dismissing their thousands of employes. Sisters were being taken to their last resting place, and this cortege was followed by two white hearses containing the bodies of another brother and sister. Both funeral processions went to the same depot, and all four victims were buried in the same cemetery.