on the threshold of so much misery; and who could murmur when
the head of our little company set such an heroic example of patience. I
have seen her in many trying situations, that threatened the fortitude
and endurance of the strongest--and have yet to hear the first word of
complaint from her lips. She smilingly 'bunked' upon two seats laid
together--compared to which, for softness, the _penitente's_ slab of
stone would be as 'downy beds of ease'--and encouraged her companions to
do the same. Hunger and thirst would also have been our portion, had it
not been for a Salvation Army Corps encamped in the vicinity, and the
Relief Train of the Philadelphia North American, stranded like
ourselves. Thanks to those good Samaritans, we dined and breakfasted on
tinned beef, bread and coffee; and what more could good soldiers
require?

"That night in Texas City will be long remembered. Sleep was out of the
question--stretched on those cross-bars, like St. Lawrence on his
gridiron. Soldiers patrolled the beach, not only to prevent a stampede
of the boat, but to protect both the quick and the dead from fiends in
human guise, who prowled the devastated region, committing atrocities
too horrible to name. All night the steady tramp, tramp, of the guard
sounded beneath the car-windows, while at either door stood two
sentinels, muskets on shoulders. Skies of inky blackness, studded with
stars of extraordinary brilliancy, seemed to bend much nearer the earth
than at the North; and the Great Dipper hung low on the horizon--for
only just across the Gulf it disappears to give place to the Southern
Cross. Myriads of big, bright fire-flies, resembling balls of flame,
flitted restlessly over the plain, like the disembodied souls whose
homes were here one short week before, searching for their scattered
treasures. Over on Galveston Island, a long line of flame, mounting to
the heavens, marked the burning of ruined homes and corpses; while other
fires, in all directions on the mainland, told of similar ghastly
cremations. At one time I counted twenty-three of these fires, not
including those on the island. Early in the morning a strange odor drew
attention to a fresh funeral-pyre, only a few rods away, around the
horse-shoe curve of the shore. We were told that thirty bodies, found
since daybreak in the immediate vicinity, were being consumed in it.
That peculiar smell of burning flesh, so sickening at first, became
horribly familiar within th