Fearful tragedy in Roxbur.
--
Four Persons Burnt to Death.--The recent tenement house tragedy in New York has found a parallel at
Roxbury, Mass., where a fire broken out, in the midst of a snow storm, at 3 o'clock on Tuesday morning, and communicated to a house occupied by fifteen poor families.
The Boston Journal says:
‘
In one of the rooms on the second story was the family of
John Smith, consisting of himself, wife, a daughter and several sons.
The father, aroused from his sleep to find the flames raging all round him, leaped from the window, but not until he had been severely burned in endeavoring to rescue some of the members of his family.
The distance to the ground was about 15 or 20 feet, and he was so much injured by the fire and the fall that
Dr. Streeter gives his opinion that he cannot live through the night.
After the fury of the flames had been somewhat abated by the persevering labors of the firemen, some of the police entered the house through the almost blinding smoke, and in the room occupied by the
Smith family found the wife and a daughter of 16 years dead upon the floor, and their bodies badly burned.
In one of the rear rooms, occupied by
John Kelley and wife, each about 85 years old, the couple were found on the floor, burned to a crisp.
Mr. Kelley had been sick for some time, and it is supposed that the wife had attempted to aid her more feeble husband in making his escape, but that both were suffocated by the smoke, and died by that means rather than by the flames.
The stairways leading to the rooms were not destroyed, but the large number of persons in the house — probably more than fifty at the time of the disaster — rendered it nearly impossible for all to escape the fearful doom which awaited those less fortunate ones whom age or disease had crippled.
The bodies were taken to the alms-house, where they were visited by large numbers of their fellow-natives of the
Emerald Isle, who are always ready to sympathize with their countrymen in times of distress.
’
