The Riotous Destruction of a Home

We all know how property is destroyed at fires. Men act as though they had lost all sense, and they chop up good furniture and tear, as though they were doing the correct thing, and were saving the goods of their friends. This is particularly noticeable when this injury and loss would have been avoided if the property had been kept out of the building or out of the line of fire. An instance of this character occurred recently in the house of a woman in this city. When she arrived from the fire, she found the fire brigade and a mass of men who were ostensibly from the insurance companies engaged in a scene of destruction rarely witnessed. The legs and pedals of a $700 Chickering piano were smashed from under it with axes, while torn and matt in frantic efforts to tear aside velvet curtains from $100 to $200 per pair, were stripped from the windows, tearing them to shreds; paintings were hauled from the second-story windows; the frames of costly mirrors shared the same fate; plastering and joists were torn from the walls by hands of excited men, and the hand-carved and gilded newel post and balusters were torn bodily from the stairway and broken to splinters. The chief engineer and other members of the department tried to cause them to desist, but entreaties and commands were alike futile, and the work of destruction went on until the fire was fully subdued.