The numerous funeral trains which left Chicago contained in nearly every instance more than one coffin. Hearse after hearse and carriage after carriage arrived in the blinding snow and stopped at the depots, opening an epoch of funerals that continued daily until the last victim was laid to rest.
Thus opened the year 1904 in Chicago, the stricken and desolate.
CHAPTER XI.
A SABBATH OF WOE.
A majority of the victims of the fire were laid to rest, however, during the Sabbath succeeding the awful calamity. The main thoroughfares of the benumbed city leading north and west toward the resting places of the dead were crowded with funeral processions, sometimes four and five hearses together showing as white as the snow on the ground, bearing as they did the bodies of children.
As one funeral procession after another passed through the streets the numbers of the sorrowing at the cemeteries increased. A few hundred feet from one freshly made grave there was another and a short distance away still another that told the mourners at one funeral that others were bereaved.
The work of burying the dead began early in the morning and lasted until late in the evening. Sometimes the homes of several of the dead were grouped in a few blocks and in one instance a glance down a single street would reveal the thickly crowded carriages for half a dozen funerals that had thrown an entire neighborhood into mourning. Where hearses could not be furnished they were improvised from other kinds of vehicles and mourners who could not get cabs rode in carriages. As the night closed down on hundreds of mourning homes, in every cemetery in the city the speaking mounds of fresh earth told of the end of families broken and altogether destroyed.