orming a background of greenery for the
charming picture. Palms shade the narrow, clean, white, paved streets;
trade goes on at the wharves; the people visit in social gaiety,
dressed in white or bright-colored garments, as is the fashion in
these islands, where somberness seldom rules; all the forms of life
are cheerful, light-hearted, even thoughtless.

Suddenly a thrall of black despair is cast over the happy island. The
city of pleasure becomes one great tomb. Of its 30,000 men, women and
children, all but a few are slain. The Angel of Death has spread his
pall over them, a fiery breath has smitten them, and they have fallen
as dry stubble before the sweep of flame. A city is dead. An island is
desolate. A world is grief-stricken.

And what was the awful power of evil that robbed of life 50,000 in
city and neighboring villages almost in a moment? It was this
verdure-clad Mount Pelee, their familiar sentinel, in the shade of
whose sheltering palms they had built their summer resorts or found
their innocent pleasures. It was this shadowing summit, now suddenly
become a fiery vent through which earth's artilleries blazed forth
their terrible volleys of molten projectiles, lava masses, huge drifts
of ashes, and clouds of flaming, noxious, gaseous emanations to
suffocate every living thing. Nothing could withstand such a
bombardment from the exhaustless magazines within the vast chambers of
the planet, no longer kindly Mother Earth, benign in the beauty of
May-time, but cruel, relentless, merciless alike to all.

St. Pierre and the island of Martinique are no strangers to
destructive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In August, 1767, an
earthquake killed 1,600 persons in St. Pierre. In 1851 Mount Pelee
threatened the city with destruction. St. Pierre was practically
destroyed once before, in August, 1891, by the great hurricane which
swept over the islands. The harbor of St. Pierre has been a famous one
for centuries. It was off this harbor on April 12, 1782, that Admiral
Rodney's fleet defeated the French squadron under the Comte de Grasse
and wrested the West Indies from France.

St. Pierre was the largest town and the commercial center of the
island. It was the largest town in the French West Indies, and was
well built and prosperous. It had a population of about 30,000. It was
divided into two parts, known as the upper and lower towns. The lower
town was compact with narrow streets, and unhealthy. The upper tow