Part 2

In only about one-third of the cases were the limbs exposed through the torn and burned clothing. Uplifted hands, whose fingers were shining bones, bore golden rings, and shoeless feet glistened in their whiteness. The hair and whiskers were gone, and faces were terribly scarred. A few of the bodies were burned to a crisp, and these were put into rough pine boxes, and all hope for their identification was given up.

Until late in the afternoon, men, women, and children flocked to the Washington street station to tell of fathers, husbands, brothers, and children who had not returned to their homes since the evening previous. Hour by hour the list of missing persons increased in numbers until it comprised nearly 200 names. All who made inquiry for friends or relatives were necessarily disappointed, for the blackened, charred bodies were few of them in a condition to be identified. Strong men, who had kept up both heart and hope, broke down and sobbed like women when they learned their own flesh and blood might never be discovered from out of the scores of shapeless trunks that were being exhumed from the ruins. Women came in sobbing and went away convulsed with grief. The policemen themselves often surrendered their forced self-possession and sobbed aloud.

In the evening the work was continued by the aid of calcium lights. It was thought best to discontinue the removal of the bodies from the rear through Theatre alley to Myrtle avenue. Sixty-seven in all had been taken out that way. The main entrance, with the ghastly burdens still regularly coming out of it, was thrown into bold relief. The burner and lantern had been knocked off the street lamp over the way, and a great flame of gas blazed and flared into the air, lighting up the scorched and splintered doorway and the upturned faces of the throng. A calcium light on the sidewalk near the door illumined the corridor to the point where the floor had broken, and there another was fixed whose rays shone directly into the deep pit in which the earlier search had discovered the horrible mass of charred human bodies.

This pit was the cellar of the main corridor, and its ruins were separated from the debris in the auditorium by the strong foundation wall that had borne the gallery columns. It was not until nine o'clock that this cellar, about twelve feet wide, and running through to the foundation wall on the alley side, was cleared. Over one hundred and fifty bodies had been removed from it.

Toward the rear fewer were found, and those were evidently not from the gallery, as fragments of kid gloves could be seen on the fingers of the blackened hands, some of which still clutched opera-glasses. These bodies were more thoroughly calcined than those first found, and not unfrequently the firemen were able to put two or three into one box.

After dark the orders against admitting outsiders to the ruins were more strictly enforced. Among those admitted was the foreman of the Grand Jury, W. W. Shumway. A calcium light from the alley wall shone over the ruins of the auditorium, and here the firemen began work shortly after nine o'clock. In addition to the lime light, oil lamps with reflectors and lanterns were used.

In this fitful glare the firemen, their faces pallid from fatigue and hunger, toiled on without a word. The first body found in the auditorium was on the Theatre alley side. Its position indicates that the victim had reached a window when he was struck down.

Some friends of Mr. Murdoch were very anxious that an early effort should be made to recover his body. His mother was expected to arrive in the city during the evening, he having sent for her a few days before. About nine o'clock a stream of water was put upon the ruins in the northeast corner to cool the immense pile of bricks under which the body was thought to lie.

The firemen were greatly impeded by the clouds of steam. They made their way from the southern end toward the stage. The broken wall lay in great lumps of brick and mortar. About halfway toward the stage shapeless human flesh was found crushed between two huge masses which had protected it from the flames that had consumed all the rest of the body. It was long before the bricks could be sufficiently cooled to admit the removal of this fragment. It was feared all the bodies in this part of the ruins had been similarly or more thoroughly consumed, owing to the intense heat from the inflammable stage fixtures.

The interior of the Adams Street Market presented at night a weirdly horrible sight. Disuse had made the place grimy. The gas fixtures had been removed, and candle light had to be used. The bodies were in rows that reached the entire length of the long apartment. On the breast of each was a lighted candle held in a small block of wood. Candles were also stuck on the hooks that had once been used to hang meat on, and lanterns helped to illuminate the spacious place; but the combined light was not sufficient to rid the corners of dark shadows. The bodies were in strained shapes, as though death had stopped them in a writhing struggle. Their arms were raised to their faces in most instances, the gesture suggesting suffocation or warding off heat. The charring made them appalling to look at. At an old counter officers added to lists the names of the few who were from time to time identified.

Articles taken from the bodies were in a basket, enveloped and numbered, and corresponding numbers were written on slips of paper and pinned to the rags that still clung to the corpses. Men and women passed from body to body, seeking friends or relatives, examining the bits of clothing, holding the candles close to the blackened faces, and looking for scars or other marks that might make recognition possible. They were wonderfully composed in manner, the only outbreaks of feeling being when a search was successful, and that was very rare. They were in the main of the poor class, such as occupy the galleries of theatres. They were persistent in their sad task, going along the rows of ill-shapen remains without missing a thing that promised identification. In several instances importunate appeals were made for permission to remove recognized remains, but the coroners decided not to grant that privilege until the next day.

On the next morning (December 7th) the confusion was less at the scene of the awful catastrophe, but the solemn gloom was deeper than before, the excitement was nearly as great, and the under-currents of sympathy more intense. There was a gloom in Brooklyn which could be felt even in the streets. There was but one topic of conversation. Men, women, and children thought and talked of little else than the Brooklyn Theatre and the burned dead beneath its ruins. On the sidewalks, in the street-cars, on the ferry-boats, there was one and the same subject of interest. In the neighborhood of the theatre itself the excitement was at its height. But there was little to be seen that could either stimulate or gratify curiosity. Two or three undertakers' wagons with the ugly coffins from the dead-house, were in attendance, but the uninterrupted procession of corpses, which was so horrible a feature of the scene on Wednesday, ended late at night, and on this morning there was nothing to see save the smouldering ruins of the theatre. There was only the great void where the theatre had stood, a mere rim of crumbling walls, scarcely breast high, enclosing immense heaps of brick and rubbish, from which columns of steam arose in the air.

A surging mass of people occupied the sidewalk in front of the dead-house, and stretched into the middle of the street, and men and boys clambered upon fences and wagons in the neighborhood, and gazed intently at the blank walls of the building. Policemen guarded the main entrance and the iron gateway before it. No permits for admission were demanded of those persons who could satisfy the officers that they had lost friends or relatives by the fire. They were allowed to enter from time to time, passing in the front door and through the room on the right-hand, which contained about thirty bodies, lying on the floor, none of them identified; so, through a smaller room at the further end of the building, back to the left-hand room, in which some of the corpses were lying upon marble slabs and tables in the centre. Upon such bits of clothing as remained upon the bodies, numbers, written hastily with lead-pencils on bits of paper, had been pinned; and where a body had been recognized, the name and address were added to the number. Then, upon receipt of the coroner's permission, the corpse was placed in a plain deal coffin and sent to the address given by the persons who had claimed it.

On Friday morning (December 8th) the work of removing and examining the ruins was suspended, it being deemed unsafe to proceed any further while the walls remained in such an unsafe position. The dangerous parts of the walls were, however, braced, and the firemen resumed their labors in the afternoon.

During Friday night and early Saturday morning a large number of small pieces of bodies, and several heads, were discovered, and the trunk of a body which was identified as that of Mr. Murdoch. The remains were taken in charge by an undertaker.

Many of the bodies were so mangled and charred that it was impossible to identify them, and it was determined by the Board of Aldermen to bury these at the public expense. The scenes at the Morgue and the old market on Saturday morning were, if possible, more heartrending and horrible than anything that had occurred in those places since the burning of the theatre. The undertakers' wagons rattled up to the door of the old market by dozens, and the coffins of stained and polished wood, studded with silver nails, were ranged in rows on the market floor, beside the black, gnarled things that had been human bodies. Outside a motley crowd of men, women, and boys pressed close to the doors and tried to get past the police lines in order to witness the work of putting the stiffened and distorted bodies into the narrow coffins. Wandering among the ghastly rows was the usual throng of sight-seers and mourners searching for friends.

Soon after one o'clock the last coffin was taken from the old market, and the driver who carried it hurried away after the others. The crowd around the door took a last glance at the blackened floors inside, as though the horrible place had fascinated them, and then chased the wagons and carriages that were going to join the procession.

_The Funeral._

At a quarter before two o'clock the gleam of bayonets appeared in Schermerhorn street, and the winds bore fitfully the strains of a dirge played by a military band. The head of the procession was nearing the point of establishment of the right of the line. At Flatbush avenue it halted for ten minutes only, while the disposition of the various parts of the procession was perfected. The Twenty-third Regiment, that had marched up in hollow square formation, opened and rested at an "order arms," while the Forty-seventh Regiment passed through and took the right of the line, headed by its splendid band. Then the hearses and undertakers' wagons were broken from single to double column, and the Twenty-third Regiment was placed as a guard of honor, surrounding this portion of the mournful cortege. The other necessary dispositions were quietly effected, and then the march was resumed, with the procession in the following order:

Squad of Mounted Police--Sergeant Johnson. Alderman Fisher and Supervisor Quimby of Committees--in carriage. Forty-seventh Regiment Band. Forty-seventh Regiment. Detachment Fourteenth Regiment, without arms. Gatling Battery, without piece. Conterno's Band. Twenty-third Regiment as Guard of Honor, leading and flanking first hearses. Hearses--Seventeen. Forty-five Undertakers' Wagons, with from one to four coffins each. Carriages with Relatives and Friends. Carriages with Ministers and Officials. Thirteenth Regiment and Drum Corps.

Near Bergen street the dirge which the band had been playing up to that point ceased, and the roll of twenty-four muffled tenor drums marked the time for the steps of the military. Solemnly impressive as had been the music of the band it seemed infinitely less effective than the roll of the drums. The former had the color of melody, even though full of sadness, but the latter impressed itself on the heart as a monotone of sobs. The air grew heavier with the weight of those measured pulsations of half-voiced grief. Along both sidewalks moved steadily, keeping step with the procession, a silent multitude. There was no hurrying, no conversation to beguile the weary way; only a sullen resistance to the frenzy of the gale.

The drums ceased, and from the military band wailed forth another dirge more weirdly sad than that first played. A trembling, thrilling cry, as of a stricken soul, voiced by a single cornet, awoke, a harmonic wail, in hearing which, one could not repress a shudder. Again the music ceased, and the terrible roll of the muffled drums began, mingled with the shriekings of the storm.

The march was a terrible one, for its oppressive gloom, the deadly cold, the grief on every hand; but that portion from Sixth avenue to the gate of Greenwood Cemetery was in all respects the worst. All that way the roll of the muffled drums continued, and across the wide vacant spaces toward the bay the icy blast seemed the breath of death itself.

Battle Hill, where the arrangements for the interment of the bodies in one common grave had already been made, is the highest point of ground in the cemetery, and is situated but a short distance from the gate by which the procession entered. Here a circular trench had been cut, seven feet deep and thirteen feet wide, nearly surrounding a round sodded space ten feet in diameter, upon which the projected monument is to stand.

It soon became evident that human endurance would be insufficient to bear any protraction of the obsequies. With wonderful fortitude, not less than 2,000 persons maintained their places about the enormous grave, held as if by a hideous fascination. But all were suffering intensely from cold, and it was determined by those in charge to make the services as brief as possible.

The Rev. John Parker read the Protestant Episcopal burial service. The Rev. Dr. Putnam, instead of the extended funeral oration which he had prepared for the occasion, announced that the extreme cold would preclude the possibility of its delivery, and merely said a few brief words on the uncertainty of life and the blessed hopes of immortality. Then the benediction was pronounced by the Rev. Mr. Odell, and the ceremony concluded with the singing by the Germania choir of Kuhlau's beautiful choral, "Above all summits there is repose."

Besides the public funeral, many private ones, of persons who had been identified by friends, took place on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

The bodies of the actors Murdoch and Burroughs were taken to Irving Hall at 1 o'clock on Saturday, and remained in state until the funeral on Sunday.

Great festoons of crape hung in long curves from a common centre in the middle of the room reaching to the galleries, that were draped in funeral cloth. Each end of the hall bore its burden of black. Two circles of gas in the ceiling cast a melancholy radiance. The bodies were encased in two rosewood coffins mounted with silver, which were placed in the centre of the room. The coffins severally bore the inscriptions:

CLAUDE DE BLENAU BURROUGHS, Born Aug. 12, 1848; died Dec. 5, 1876.

HENRY S. MURDOCH, Died Dec. 5, 1876, aged 31.

Crosses and wreaths, the gifts of friends, covered the lid of each. At their head was placed a stand containing a large scroll of white flowers with the word "Arcadian" in violet, the tribute of the members of the former club of that name. There was also a rich offering from the Order of Elks, with the mystic initials of the order predominant. As soon as the bodies were placed in position friends began to pass by the coffins. They continued to do so in the afternoon and evening. During the night the bodies were watched by a committee, the members of which relieved each other at intervals.

The funeral services were held in the Church of the Transfiguration, better known as "The Little Church Around the Corner." The services were very impressive, and the attendance was very large. Dr. Houghton conducted. The remains of Mr. Burroughs were placed in the receiving vault of the Second Street Cemetery, and those of Mr. Murdoch were taken to Philadelphia, and buried on Monday in Woodland Cemetery, the funeral services being conducted in St. Peter's P. E. Church.

_Mr. Murdoch's Career on the Stage._

Mr. Henry S. Murdoch, one of the victims of the terrible calamity, was engaged in the cast of the "Two Orphans" as _Pierre_, the cripple, and was the sole support of a widowed mother and two sisters, who reside in Philadelphia. The latter were expected in Brooklyn next week to visit their brother during the Christmas holidays. Mr. Murdoch was born in Boston, August 5, 1845, and was consequently in the thirty-second year of his age. He received his education in Philadelphia, and made his début at the Arch Street Theatre, in that city, in the winter of 1864. During the season of 1865 he fulfilled an engagement at the Boston Museum, and from there he went to Cincinnati, where he performed at Pike's Opera-house until its destruction by fire on March 22, 1866. In this case he narrowly escaped with his life, and lost his entire wardrobe in the fire. He next went to San Francisco, where he played with John McCullough at the California Theatre. He remained there two years--1867-8. He then performed short engagements in Washington, Baltimore, St. Louis and Pittsburgh. In 1872-3 he played at the Arch Street Theatre, Philadelphia, under the management of Mrs. John Drew, taking the parts of "fop" and "walking gentleman," and upon one or two occasions played leading characters. The season of 1873-4 he spent in Chicago, and acted at Hooley's Theatre, under the management of Mr. Fred Williams, of Boston. He resigned his position before the close of the season to support Miss Clara Morris at the Academy of Music in the same city, then under the management of Mr. C. R. Gardner, who is now the manager of the Arch Street Theatre, Philadelphia, where Mr. Murdoch made his début. During his engagement with Miss Morris he made a decided hit as _Armande_, in the play of "Camille." At the conclusion of his engagement in Chicago he returned to Boston, where he remained one season, and commenced his engagement with Messrs. Shook & Palmer last spring, when he played the part of _Sandy Morton_, in the play of "Two Men of Sandy Bar," at the Union Square Theatre, New York. From there he went to the Brooklyn Theatre on October 9 last. Mr. Murdoch was a nephew of Mr. James E. Murdoch, the eminent tragedian, and a brother of Frank Murdoch, the author of "Davy Crockett." He has a brother in New Orleans also an actor, whose stage name is William Wallace, and who lately made his début in that city. Mr. Murdoch was an accomplished and educated gentleman, and a rising actor. During his engagement in Boston he played such characters as _Charles Middlewick_, in the play of "Our Boys," and _Harry Spreadbrow_, in "Sweethearts." He gave much satisfaction in Brooklyn in his interpretation of Eustace, in "Conscience," _Charles Surface_, in "School for Scandal," and was giving an exceptionally good rendition of _Pierre_, the cripple, in the "Two Orphans," at the time of the fire. He was a good vocalist and amateur artist. He had been suffering from sciatica for some time, and the malady had given him considerable pain during the six weeks previous to his tragic death, causing him to limp painfully at times. He occupied apartments at No. 53 Concord street, where his uncle, Mr. Henry Murdoch, resides.

_Claude Burroughs._

Claude Burroughs first made his appearance on the stage at the Winter Garden, New York, in 1865, playing in "Hamlet" with Edwin Booth. At the conclusion of his engagement with Mr. Stuart, who was then managing the Winter Garden, he went to Brooklyn, where he played light comedy parts in the Park Theatre, then under Mrs. Conway's management. Upon the opening of the Union Square Theatre by Messrs. Shook & Palmer Mr. Burroughs was engaged to play light parts. His first appearance at that theatre was as a _reporter_ in "Agnes," the first piece produced in the house, and he has been in the cast of nearly every play since produced there. Upon a few occasions when not playing in New York he has accepted engagements in Brooklyn. He was the fop in "Atherley Court," the fop in "Jane Eyre," _Maxime_ in "Ferreol," and a very clever representative of _Talbot Champneys_ in "Our Boys." At the time of his death he was playing _Picard_, the valet in the "Two Orphans." Since the opening of the St. Stephen's Hotel, in Eleventh street, in October, Mr. Burroughs has lived there. He had a delightful summer residence at Larchmont, on the New Haven Road, where he was wont to entertain his numerous friends. He was about twenty-six years of age and unmarried.

_Sketches of other Victims._

Stuart Campbell Hand, a young reporter on the staff of the _Commercial Advertiser_ of New York, is among the victims of the calamity. He is known to have visited the theatre on the night of the fire, and has not been seen since. He was only eighteen years old.

William L. Donnelly, another young reporter, left his home on the evening of the fire to visit the theatre, and was never seen alive again. He had just returned to New York from a journalistic trip to the West. Among the charred remains his stepfather felt assured he had discovered poor Donnelly's body, identifying it by several articles of clothing; but as these articles were partly divided between two crisped trunks his mother declined to acquiesce in the identification, for fear of receiving the wrong body.

Mrs. Caroline Berri and her mother, Mrs. Martin, were undoubtedly trampled upon by the panic-stricken audience, and then fell victims to the flames. Mrs. Berri was the wife of officer Richard Berri, of District-Attorney Britton's office. He accompanied her and Mrs. Martin to the theatre; but when the cry of fire rang through the house, and the audience became uncontrollable, he was standing in the vestibule. He tried to push into the theatre to rescue his relatives, but was carried by the rushing crowd out into the street. His wife and her mother undoubtedly perished together.

Officer Patrick McKean, of the Central Office Squad, who was detailed to preserve order in the gallery of the theatre, is among the dead. He was a good officer, and had been made a member of the Central Squad for his exemplary conduct. He was seen working bravely in the vestibule of the theatre, trying to get the panic-stricken people to move out in an orderly manner. Just before the fatal blast of smoke and gas filled the entire building it was noticed that he was exhausted by his hard labors; that he had lost his hat, and that his coat was torn from him by the surging crowd. It is supposed that he was precipitated, when the flooring gave way, into the horrible pit from which so many dead were taken on Wednesday. Officer McKean was a young man--about thirty years of age, and the support of a widowed mother.