sudden, awful shriek, and then could hear no more.

"The little that actually happened then can be briefly, very briefly
told," says W. S. Merriwether, the New York Herald correspondent. "It
is known that at one minute there lay a city smiling in the summer
morning; that in another it was a mass of swirling flames, with every
soul of its 30,000 writhing in the throes of death. One moment and
church bells were ringing joyful chimes in the ears of St. Pierre's
30,000 people--the next the flame-clogged bells were sobbing a requiem
for 30,000 dead. One waft of morning breeze flowed over cathedral
spires and domes, over facades and arches and roofs and angles of a
populous and light-hearted city--the next swept a lone mass of white
hot ruins. The sun glistened one moment on sparkling fountains, green
parks and fronded palms--its next ray shone on fusing metal,
blistered, flame-wrecked squares and charred stumps of trees. One day
and the city was all light and color, all gayety and grace--the next
its ruins looked as though they had been crusted over with twenty
centuries of solitude and silence."

St. Pierre was a vast charnel-house. Skirting for nearly a league the
blue waters of the Caribbean, its smoking ruins became the funeral
pyre of 30,000, not one of whom lived long enough to tell adequately a
story that will stand grim, awful, unforgotten as that of Herculaneum,
when the world is older by a thousand years.

St. Pierre was as dead as Pompeii. Most of her people lay fathoms deep
in a tomb made in the twinkling of an eye by the collapse of their
homes, and sealed forever under tons of boiling mud, avalanches of
scoria and a hurricane of volcanic dust.

Over the entombed city the volcano from a dozen vents yet poured its
steaming vapors in long, curling wreaths, that mounted thousands of
feet aloft, like smoking incense from a gigantic censer above the bier
of some mighty dead.

Such was the disaster which burst upon the hapless people of the
island of Martinique, while almost at the same moment a sister isle,
St. Vincent, was suffering a kindred fate. Similar in natural
conditions, these two little colonies of the West Indies, one French
and one English by affiliation, underwent the shock of nature's
assault and sank in grief before a horror-stricken world.

Transcriber's Note

There are some inconsistencies in the chapter subheadings between the
Table of Contents and chapters themselves; these have bee