meared with the dirt
that shows the height of the flood.

But inside those houses--that is the dreadful thing. The rooms that the
water filled are like damp caves. Mud lies thick on the floors, the
walls are streaked with slime, and the paper hangs down in dismal
festoons. Some pictures may remain hanging, but they are all twisted and
tarnished. The furniture is a tumbled mass of confusion and filth. But
the worst is the reek of decay and death about the place.

THE TRAGEDY OF DEATH AND SUFFERING

But there is something greater in its tragedy than all this--something
greater than a great region where splendid cities, towns and humble
villages alike are without resource--something greater than a region of
broken dams and embankments and of placid rivers gone mad in flood,
bridgeless, uncontrollable, widened into lakes, into seas. It is the
hundreds of dead who died a hideous death, and the hundreds of thousands
of living who are left helpless and homeless, and all but hopeless.

Just for one moment think--we in our warm, comfortable houses,
comfortably clad, safe, smiling and happy--of the half million of our
fellow creatures out yonder shivering and trembling and dying, in the
grasp of the "destruction that wasteth at noonday," swiftly pursued by
"the pestilence which walketh in darkness." The leaping terror of the
flames climaxes the terror of the harrowing day and the helpless,
hopeless night of agony and sorrow and despair.

Think of the men, women, children and the little babies crushed and
mangled amid the wreck of shattered homes--but yesterday as beautiful
and bright as ours--the pallid faces of hundreds floating as corpses in
the stately streets turned into rushing rivers by the relentless
floods--brothers and sisters of ours, freezing and starving in homes
turned suddenly into broken rafts and battered houseboats amid the muddy
deluge, while the pitying stars look down at night upon thousands, wet,
weeping, shivering, hungry, helpless and homeless, with the host of
their unrecognized and unburied dead, in this frightful holocaust of
fire and flood and pestilence.

Think of the region where people are huddled shivering on hills or
housetops, watching the swelling waters; where practically every
convenience, means of communication, comfort, appliance of civilization
has been wiped out or stopped; where there is little to eat and no way
of getting food save from the country beyond the waters; where
millio