round between them; their shattered
cornices and coping, the tops of their frowning walls, appear piled
from both sides to the center of the street. It seems that a touch
would now send the shattered masses left standing, down upon the
people below, who look up to them and shrink together as the tremor of
the earthquake again passes under them, and the mysterious
reverberations swell and roll along, like some infernal drumbeat
summoning them to die. It passes away, and again is experienced the
blessed feeling of deliverance from impending calamity, which it may
well be believed evokes a mute but earnest offering of mingled prayer
and thanksgiving from every heart in the throng."

One of the most awful tragedies of modern times visited Galveston,
Texas, on Saturday, September 8, 1900. A tempest, so terrible that no
words can adequately describe its intensity, and a flood which swept
over the city like a raging sea, left death and ruin behind it.
Sixty-seven blocks in a thickly populated section of the city were
devastated, and not a house withstood the storm. The few that might
have held together if dependent upon their own construction and
foundations, were buried beneath the stream of buildings and wreckage
that rushed west from the Gulf of Mexico, demolishing hundreds of
homes and carrying the unfortunate inmates to their death.

A terrific wind, which attained a velocity of from 100 to 120 miles an
hour, blew the debris inland and piled it in a hill ranging from ten
to twenty feet high. Beneath this long ridge many hundred men, women,
and children were buried, and cattle, horses and dogs, and other
animals, were piled together in one confused mass.

The principal work of destruction was completed in six short hours,
beginning at three o'clock in the afternoon and ending at nine o'clock
the same night. In that brief time the accumulations of many a life
time were swept away, thousands of lives went out, and the dismal
Sunday morning following the catastrophe found a stricken population
paralyzed and helpless.

Every hour the situation changed for the worse, and the mind became
dazed midst the gruesome scenes. The bodies of human beings, the
carcasses of animals, were strewn on every hand. The bay was filled
with them. Like jelly-fish, the corpses were swept with the changing
tide. Here a face protruded above the water; there the foot of a
child; here the long, silken tresses of a young girl; there a tiny
hand, an