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

STORIES OF SORROW.

George H. Walker, of San Antonio, known well in theatrical circles, was a member of the party which struggled all day Tuesday to get to Galveston, and he landed late at night. It was an anxious day for him, for this was the city of his birth and before the storm he had six brothers and five sisters living here, in addition to his son, an aunt and his mother-in-law.

He found his son safe and many other members of his family. They told him how the boy, Earl, a lad of 15, had at the height of the tempest placed his grandmother, Mrs. C. S. Johnson, on the roof of the house after it was floating in the current, and had made a second trip to bring his aunt to the roof. When the lad returned the grandmother was gone, finding in the raging current her final peace. The boy and his aunt, another Mrs. Johnson, clung to the roof throughout and successfully weathered the gale.

George Walker found later on, however, that his brother Joe, and his stepbrother, Nick Donley, had been swept away to feed the fury of the storm.

I met W. R. Knight, of Dallas, who arrived yesterday at noon. He told me that he had found his mother, two unmarried sisters and a married sister, Mrs. E. Webster, safe. But he, too, had his sorrow. A sister, Mrs. Ida Toothaker, and her daughter Etta, were lost, and his brother-in-law, E. Webster, Sr., and five children, Charley, George, Kenneth, Julia and Sarah, had joined the other two loved ones on the bosom of the unresting sea.

How many stories of sorrow like this that remain to be told cannot now be numbered. The anxious people who have been straggling into Galveston from a distance have usually found some dear relative or many of them missing and numbered among the thousands who became in a few brief hours the victims of the remorseless furies.

It is with reluctance that I relate one case that came under my own observation. It was so horrible that perhaps it ought not to be told at all, but only such instances can convey a faint idea of the horror of the Galveston disaster. While rowing near the Huntington wharves the naked upturned body of an unfortunate woman was observed floating in the water, with a half-born infant plainly in view.