MOST MIRACULOUS ESCAPE.
“The people of Texas have not lost confidence in Galveston and have not manifested a disposition to quit the city. In to-day’s mail we received bills of lading for three hundred bales of cotton shipped to us since the storm.”
The most miraculous escape from the storm reached one of the newspapers in a roundabout way. An employe of the paper was coming to work when he overheard a few words passing between a couple of men talking on the street. He heard enough to elicit his interest and made inquiries. One of the men told him that an old German, whose name he did not know, had been picked out of the debris at Sherman square Saturday evening after having laid there a week.
People going by heard a sound which seemed to them like a groan. They stopped to listen and the groan was repeated. They hastily pulled off the debris and there found the old man still alive. It was understood that he was immediately taken to the home of friends at Tenth and Mechanic streets for care and treatment.
This story is the most remarkable instance of preservation of life recorded. The man must have gone through at least a portion of the storm to have been caught in the drift. He must have been above the water line at that point or he would have drowned. Why his groans were not heard before is not understood, unless it be that he laid unconscious until shortly before he was found. What a tenacity of life the man must have had to lie there for a week without food or water buried beneath all that debris.
Pete Brophey, clerk of the corporation court, is lying in a room at the Tremont Hotel suffering from injuries received in the storm. The story he tells of his miraculous escape, like the many others, wonderful, yet terrible, is also one of sorrow, as he lost his aged parents in the storm.