“ALL GONE!—ALL GONE!”
“One man would ask another how his family had come out,” said Mr. Menage last night, “and the answer would be indifferent and hard—almost offish: ‘Oh, all gone.’ ‘All gone’ was the phrase on all sides.
“The night before the disaster, when I reached the hotel, it was blowing rather hard, and the clerk said we were in for a storm, and I asked him if his roof was firmly fixed, and he said, ‘Well, it won’t be quite as bad as that,’ but by the next night at the same time there was three feet of water in the rotunda and the skylight had fallen in and the servants’ annex been blown to pieces, and the place was crowded with refugees who arrived from all points of the city in boats. Saturday night there was little sleep, yet no one realized the extent of the disaster.
“On Sunday morning one could walk on the higher streets, so quickly had the water gone down. I took a walk along the beach, and the place was one great litter of overturned houses, debris of all kinds and corpses. I met one woman who burst into tears at sight of a small rocker, her property, mixed in among the wreckage. She had lost all her family in the flood. People were for the most part bereft of their senses from the horror, and a single funeral would have seemed more terrible—more solemn—than a pile of cremated bodies.
“The tales of looting are only too true, and as I passed northward in a sailboat on Tuesday I heard the shots ring out which told that some ghoul was paying the penalty. Galveston will rise again on the old site, and without as much difficulty as is at present anticipated. Most of the people will, however, try and live on the mainland.”
Miss Sarah E. Pilkington, a well-known young woman of Chester, Penna., was one of those who escaped the terrible storm which broke over Galveston. Miss Pilkington left Houston just a few hours before the dreadful storm broke, but she was sufficiently near its origin to hear the rush and roar of the wind. “I distinctly remember,” said she, “the approach of the hurricane. It sounded like two express trains, each rumbling in opposite directions. Suddenly there was a loud report similar to the noise of a big collision, and the tornado was separated, one portion going in the direction of Galveston, the other wending its way toward Houston. I was staying at Milliken.”
For some time after the hurricane Miss Pilkington could not be communicated with, and it was thought for a week that she had perished in the tornado.
NO TIME TO DIG GRAVES.
Galveston, Texas, Tuesday.—The work of digging bodies from the mass of wreckage still continues. More than 400 bodies were taken out of the debris which lines the beach front to-day. With all that has been done to recover bodies buried beneath or pinned in the immense rift, the work has hardly started. There is no time to dig graves, and the bodies, beaten and bruised beyond identification, are hastily consigned to the flames.
Volunteers for this work are coming in fast. Men who have heretofore avoided the dead under ordinary conditions are now working with vigorous will and energy in putting them away. Under one pile of wreckage this afternoon twenty bodies were taken out and cremated. In another pile a man pulled out the bodies of two children, and for a moment gazed upon them and then mechanically cast them into the fire. They were his own children. He watched them until they were consumed and then he resumed his work, assisting in removing other bodies.