imate the picture, by scattering countless tribes of
wild animals, and hundreds of domestic ones, and even thousands of men
in the interior. Having done all this, he will have before him a feeble
outline of the extent, features, and general circumstances of the
country, which, in the course of a few hours, was suddenly enveloped in
fire. A more ghastly or a more revolting picture of human misery can not
well be imagined. The whole district of cultivated land was shrouded in
the agonizing memorials of some dreadful deforming havoc. The songs of
gladness that formerly resounded through it were no longer heard, for
the voice of misery had hushed them. Nothing broke upon the ear but the
accents of distress; the eye saw nothing but ruin, and desolation, and
death. New Castle, yesterday a flourishing town, full of trade and
spirit, and containing nearly one thousand inhabitants, was now a heap
of smoking ruins; and Douglasstown, nearly one-third of its size, was
reduced to the same miserable condition. Of the two hundred and sixty
houses and storehouses, that composed the former, but twelve remained;
and of the seventy that comprised the latter, but six were left. The
confusion on board of one hundred and fifty large vessels, then lying in
the Mirimachi, and exposed to imminent danger, was terrible--some burned
to the water's edge, others burning, and the remainder occasionally
on fire.

"Dispersed groups of half-famished, half-naked, and houseless creatures,
all more or less injured in their persons, many lamenting the loss of
some property, or children, or relations and friends, were wandering
through the country. Of the human bodies, some were seen with their
bowels protruding, others with the flesh all consumed, and the blackened
skeletons smoking; some with headless trunks, and severed extremities;
some bodies were burned to cinders, others reduced to ashes; many
bloated and swollen by suffocation, and several lying in the last
distorted position of convulsing torture; brief and violent was their
passage from life to death, and rude and melancholy was their
sepulchre--'unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.' The immediate loss of
life was upward of five hundred beings! Thousands of wild beasts, too,
had perished in the woods, and from their putrescent carcasses issued
streams of effluvium and stench that formed contagious domes over the
dismantled settlements. Domestic animals of all kinds lay dead and dying
in different pa