A REAL TRAGEDY AT GALVESTON.

Perhaps it is a safe conclusion that the tragedy poetry as set for us on the Lincolnshire stage had found expression in real life along the Texas coasts. The old Lincolnshire woman’s plaintive narrative has never seemed unreal, because it is filled with the spirit of a homely life, but just now it seems like a voice from out the past telling us of the tragedy now at our doors. The poem is a very long one, but a few selections from its narration of the widespread desolation of the country will picture much of the gulf coast of Texas at this time. The cry of the housewife for the cattle dies out in the evening stillness and then the old dame sees the flood:

And lo, along the river’s bed

A mighty eygre reared his crest,

And up the river raging sped.

It swept with thunderous noises loud—

Shaped like a curling, snow-white cloud,

Or like a demon in a shroud.

And rearing Lindus, backward pressed,

Shook all her trembling banks amain,

Then madly at the eygre’s breast

Flung uppe her weltering walls again,

Then bankes came down with ruin and rout,

Then beaten foam flew round about,

Then all the mighty floods were out.

So farre, so fast the eygre drave

The heart had hardly time to beat

Before a shallow seething wave

Sobbed in the grasses at our feet;

The feet had hardly time to flee

Before it brake against the knee—

And all the world was in the sea.

That flow strewed wrecks about the grass,

That ebbe swept out the flocks to sea—

A fatal ebbe and flow, alas,

To many more than mine and me.