The Great Galveston Disaster / Containing a Full and Thrilling Account of the Most Appalling Calamity of Modern Times Including Vivid Descriptions of the Hurricane and Terrible Rush of Waters; Immense Destruction of Dwellings, Business Houses, Churches, and Loss of Thousands of Human Lives; Thrilling Tales of Heroic Deeds; Panic-Stricken Multitudes and Heart-Rending Scenes of Agony; Frantic Efforts to Escape a Horrible Fate; Separation of Loved Ones, etc., etc.; Narrow Escapes from the Jaws of Death; Terrible Sufferings of the Survivors; Vandals Plundering Bodies of the Dead; Wonderful Exhibitions of Popular Sympathy; Millions of Dollars Sent for the Relief of the Stricken Sufferers

by Paul Lester

GENTLE AS A COUNTRY POND.

“Human lives were lost there, and the agony of it was great, but above all was the idea, ‘What of across the bay?’ It was six miles dead across, and a schooner was in waiting to take us over. But before it landed there was a chance of observation of the bay, in which the waters now gently lisped. For the bay was as gentle as a country pond. It lisped and kissed the few blades of grass that grew down where the rise and fall of the ridge was natural. It did not moan like the sea. It merely gurgled. But every little wave threw up and agitated the dead. Bloated horses and cows which provident housekeepers in the city across the water had owned and petted were there. Chickens, rats, dogs, cats and everything, it seemed, that breathed, was there, dead and swollen and making the air nauseous.

“But by their sides were people. The worn-out people of the district, having saved their own lives and buried their dead, were quick to respond to natural instincts and do right by their kind. I saw them take swollen women and swollen men and swollen children and with quick shift place them in two-foot graves. It was terrible, but what could they do?

“There were no burial services. The men who did work were simply doing what they could to relieve the air of them. They were not gentle, but how could they be gentle, when the bodies lay there with their black faces, with their terribly swollen tongues and the odor of decomposition threatening those who lived?

“In the debris from Galveston was everything. I was struck with the idea that this must have impressed the people that the world had come to an end. For twenty-five miles on the land into the interior this disorderly element raged. It destroyed and it mangled, and when it ceased really the sea had given up its dead and the secrets of life were revealed, for walking among the debris I found a trunk. It had been broken open by the waves.

“Letters were blurred by the waves. I picked up one, and it began, ‘My darling little wife,’ and I closed it and threw it among its fellows on the drift. She was dead. She had kept this letter. Their sacred relations were exposed by this terror to those who would read them. There were dozens of men who picked up those letters. No one read them, for man is not so bad after all.