FATAL FIRE IN NEW YORK.
A fire, probably of incendiary origin, which broke out in the basement of the five-story apartment house no East Ninety-seventh street. Manhattan, New York, caused the death of two girls, fifteen and eighteen years old respectively, and their grandfather, a helpless paralytic. The pile of boxes in the basement where the fire started at about 5 o’clock, a. m., had been soaked with kerosene, and the flames spread through the dumbwaiter shaft some ten feet from the blazing rubbish, and reached the top floor, where it mushroomed. The three persons who perished lived on that floor. The rest of their family escaped. The stairway on the second floor caught fire and cut off the escape of its occupants who were rescued by scaling ladders. The others were taken off the fire escapes, the balconies of which were all small, and the people had to climb over the railings to reach the ladders, up or down which even the angels seen by Jacob of old ascending and descending would have had hard work to climb, especially if the rungs and places from which they made their ascent and descent had been as congested as were those of the East Ninety-seventh street apartment house. None of the tenants escaped with more than their night clothes.
