e next two months, when we lived in it and
breathed it, day after day.

"We found the situation in Galveston infinitely worse than had been
described. The most sensational accounts of the yellowest journals fell
far short of the truth--simply because its full horror was beyond the
power of words to portray. Figures and statistics can give little idea
of the results of such an appalling calamity; and to this day, people
at a distance have no realization of the unutterable woe which our Red
Cross band of less than a dozen, strove to alleviate. We arrived on the
eighth day after the tragedy, in which upward of ten thousand lives went
suddenly out in storm and darkness; and the survivors were just
beginning to realize the extent of their losses.

"At first they seemed stunned to partial insensibility by the very
magnitude of their grief--as a man who has been mangled almost unto
death in a railroad disaster is said to be oblivious to pain. Dead
citizens lay by thousands amid the wreck of their homes, and raving
maniacs searched the _debris_ for their loved ones, with the organized
gangs of workers. Corpses, dumped by barge-loads into the Gulf, came
floating back to menace the living; and the nights were lurid with
incinerations of putrefying bodies, piled like cord-wood, black and
white together, irrespective of age, sex, or previous condition. At
least four thousand dwellings had been swept away, with all their
contents, and fully half of the population of the city was without
shelter, food, clothes, or any of the necessaries of life. Of these,
some were living in tents; others crowded in with friends hardly less
unfortunate; many half-crazed, wandering aimlessly about the streets,
and the story of their sufferings, mental and physical, is past the
telling. Every house that remained was a house of mourning. Of many
families every member had been swept away. Even sadder were the numerous
cases where one or two were left out of recently happy households; and
saddest of all was the heart-breaking suspense of those whose friends
were numbered among the 'missing.'

"We find it hard enough to lay away our dead in consecrated ground, with
all the care and tenderness that love can suggest, where we may water
the sacred spot with our tears and place upon it the flowers they loved
in life; but never to know whether their poor bodies were swallowed by
the merciless Gulf, or fed to the fishes with those grewsome
barge-loads, or lef