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Show AWFUL HOLOCAUST. ELEVEN SCHOOL CHILDREN ARE BURNED TO DEATH While Rehearsing for a Performance Their Clothes Were Set on Fire From a Gas Jet Several Others Injured. Quincy, 111., Dec. 22. While the schoolchildren of St. Francis parochial school, Seventeenth and Vine streets, were rehearsing this afternoon for an entertainment to be given next Tuesday Tues-day evening, one of their dresses caught on fire from a gas jet, and ter, minutes later four of them wert burned to death, two died an houi later, and five others died before midnight. mid-night. Half a dozen others wer burned more or less severely. Dead: Irena Frieberg, May Wavering, Waver-ing, Mary Althoff, Bernadino Freund, Colletta Middendorf, Mary Hickey, Wilhelmina Guttendorf, Olivia Timpe, Addie Futterer, Josephine Bohne, Margaret Warner. All these are between 9 and 11 years old. Helen Zebbing and several other teachers, Fathrr Nicholas and Prof. Mushold were painfully burned in trying try-ing to save the children. The fire started in a little dressing room. Three or four little girls were there dressing for the rehearsal and laughing gayly among tnemselves. A dozen others were grouped in the wings of the stage near the foot of the stairs descending from the dressing-room. dressing-room. The girls in the dressing-room had nearly completed their costumes when one of them brushed against the gas jet, but which child it was will never be known. A touch of the flame was sufficient, and in an instant her dresa of cotton and light cloth was in a blaze. She screamsd and ran out oi the room, spreading the fire to the others as she ran. One girl, with her dress in a blaze, jumped out of a small window into the stairs leading to the stage and ran down the stairs. A flaming torch she was, as she almost fell down the stairs and rushed into the groups of children standing in the wings. They were all clad, like her, in fancy costumes of cotton, lace and silk, and the fire spread with incredible rapidity from one to the other. There were fourteen children in the cast of the Christmas entertainment and few escaped. It was all over in ten minutes, and in that time four perished, seven more were fatally burned, and others more or less severely severe-ly injured. |