A CANADIAN HORROR.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXI, Issue 8784, 11 April 1907, Page 4

A CANADIAN HORROR.

The recent, fire in Montreal school, by -which 17 pupils and a teacher, Miss Maxwell, were burned to death, has been described as Canada’s most awful calamity of the kind. The school was an old, ramshackle building, with the kindergarten on the second floor. There was not a single fire escape, and it was a terrible moment for the principal, Miss Max--wcll, when it was discovered that a fire had broken out in the cellar. The principal, without alarming her pupils, told them to get their clothes and hurry home, and the other teachers were rapidly instructed to issue the same orders. All the children on the ground floor were got safely away. With remarkable quickness the fire brigade was on the spot, and the extension ladder was got up to one of the second-storey windows, behind ■ which frightened children could be seen cowering with a seething furnace of smoko and flames filling the space below. The / firemen formed a chain along the ladder for the rescue of the little ones, who were _ handed down by Miss Maxwell and passed from hand to hand to safety. The firemen worked like heroes at their task, though they were being sprayed all the time by hose, and the water was | freezing on them as it fell. But the

fire spread with inconceivable quick-1 ness, and it was impossible .to save all the 'children. When all those children about the window had been handed down, the captain of the fire brigade called to Miss Maxwell to save herself, “bio, there are others inside, and we must save them, ” was her reply, and the intrepid teacher rushed back into a room filled with smoko and flames, whore the firemen dared not follow her. In a few moments she was seen to fall in the thick smoko. The loss of life might have been less terrible, but there had not been a fire practice in the school for mouths, and when the children in the upper storeys first saw smoke ascending by the staircase, many of them feared to make the run which would have led to safety, and ‘Touched back, almost beside themselves with terror. The anguish £of the waiting mothers in the crowd below was terrible to witness, while they Hjwondcrod if their children would bo among the saved or would bo loft to perish iu the burning building.