rns, a co-operative
observer, personally visited every house in that section on Sunday, the
fifteenth, and again on Monday. Before the hurricane, eighty-eight
houses stood there; after the hurricane, there were three. Yet every one
was saved, except two people, who had laughed at the weather warnings.

"Steadily the sea rose, all day Monday, and equally steadily the wind
increased. The Fire Department joined in the work of protection. The
police joined in the work of saving. As yet the hurricane had not come,
but, through the Weather Bureau warnings, no one was allowed to pass
into a fool's paradise of security.

"The summer evening came on with the whistling whir of the wind changing
its note to an angry rage. In our little office at the top of the
building, it looked as though we should be blown away. But there was too
much to do for any man to leave. Still, had it not been for the
thoughtfulness of one friend, none of us would have had anything to eat.
We did not have a let-up of any kind for fifty-six hours.

"A wall of water swept towards the island, and before it became too dark
to observe, in the early twilight one could see the wind-lashed waters
of the bay begin to heap themselves into broken and irregular waves,
each striving to overtop the other in their plunge upon the city. They
broke, indeed, into the back door of the city, and then, with a
suddenness that seemed to rock the very foundations of the earth, the
wind struck us, in three nerve-racking blasts.

"With the savagery of the elements at their worst, the registering-pen
of the anemometer in our office began to write its message. Raging in
fury, the tempest leaped to eighty miles an hour, to a hundred miles an
hour, to a hundred and twenty miles an hour. The air in the middle of a
hurricane is estimated to have the weight of half a million ocean liners
and four hundred and seventy-three million horsepower. Imagine a weight
of several billion tons being hurled with five hundred million
horsepower at a speed of two miles a minute! That, boys, was the storm
that plucked at our little office in the sky, and that was the force
which picked up the billows of the sea and hurled them at the seawall
built by the hands of Man.

"At the signal given by the titanic winds, the waves drove in from the
gulf and from the bay and smashed into a thousand pieces the houses of
the lower section of the city. But the wind and the waves found nothing
on which to wreak