“All communicants will please accept this answer in lieu of direct response and be assured of the heartfelt gratitude of the entire population.
[Signed] “W. C. Jones, Mayor.”
CARNEGIE’S PRINCELY GIFT.
The Carnegie Company, of Pittsburg, was foremost in the contributions to the relief of the sufferers at Galveston. At the meeting of the Chamber of Commerce a motion to contribute $5000 was under discussion, when a representative of the Carnegie Company entered and said that he had been authorized by Mr. Carnegie through a cablegram to give $10,000 for the distressed. The announcement was greeted with applause.
GREAT TIDAL WAVES IN THE WORLD’S HISTORY.
The tidal wave along the Texan coast will rank among the most disastrous in history. History is deficient in the record of such tragedies in human life, but the records are written in physical geography, and are found in the conformation of shore lines, here and there, around all the continents. It is impossible to estimate the number of lives lost through inundations since mankind began, for purposes of commercial intercourse, the development of seaports. Doubtless the total would run into the hundreds of thousands, and might reach into millions.
Geology is quite sure that the rough Norwegian coast, pierced at intervals of every few miles with the fiords or estuaries which penetrate in many instances leagues into the land, tell the story of many cataclysms such as that which has just occurred along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Science, however, taking no note of the traditions or folklore of a people, antedates all human life on the Scandinavian peninsula in setting the time when this great rising of the sea against the land took place.
Scientists are agreed on putting the formation of the Norwegian shore lines as far back as the glacial period. But in the songs of the skalds, as late as the reign of Harold Hardrada, there are allusions to the valor of olden heroes over whom the seas had swept, but whose spirits rode upon the winds which blew the Norman galleys to other shores. In the Norway of the present day there are traditions, handed down through countless generations, from the remotest antiquity, telling how, but not when, the seas came in.
OLD AND CHARMING TRADITION.
One of the oldest and prettiest traditions in the world is that which tells of a submerged city somewhere on the Scandinavian coast, the minarets and towers of which poets can see reflected in the waters at sunset, and the bells of which musicians, with ears divinely attuned to concordant sounds, can hear at vespers. Without either the poet’s eye or the musician’s ear it is still possible to conclude that traditions which have survived so many centuries, and which contradict nothing of the exact truth of science as to original causes, may be as well trusted as science when it begins to speculate, which is all it does when it seeks to prove that the Scandinavian fiords were in the country before the Scandinavian himself.