Laura Brayton — page 47: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

peed LAURA BRAYTON. No! no! not lost, for there, staggering to the window, with a great bundle, wrapped, it seemed, in blankets, all on fire, he was seen. No one shouted; all appeared to hold even their breaths. Blinded, black with fire and smoke, he paused a second, as if to breathe, and then crept out through — the fire to the ladder. Slow, fearfully slow was his progress, for the flames, with their red tongues, seemed to be licking up his very life-blood. “Hurry, man—hurry for your life!” shouted the _ chief-engineer through his trumpet. “The house is all falling in.” But slowly, with his heavy burden—slowly, be- cause he was choked, and suffocated, and weak- ened, too, he had to come, and he was yet ten feet from the ground when roof and all went tumbling in with a fearful crash, and anew burst of flame and smoke. Then he let his grasp loosen from the ladder and sprang back from the falling wall. He did not reach the ground, but was caught, he and that blazing bundle, by strong arms, which carried him back from the blazing ruins into the wildly surging, shouting crowd. Tearing the blazing blankets from his blistered hands, the firemen unrolled them from the form of a woman, who, with a babe clasped to her arms, unconscious, yet breathing, had thus been saved © from a terrible death. Smoke-blackened and scorched, the face of the “comicbooks com