“The main streets of the city are pitiful. Here and there a shop of some sort is left standing. South Fifth street looks like an old man’s jaw, with one or two straggling teeth protruding. The merchants are taking their little stores of goods that have been left them and are spreading them out in the bright sunshine, trying to make some little husbanding of their small capital. The water rushed through the stores as it did through the houses, in an irresistible avalanche that carried all before it. The wonder is not that so little of Galveston is left standing, but that there is any of it at all.
“Every street corner has its story, in its history of misery and human agony bravely endured. The eye-witnesses of a hundred deaths have talked to me and told me their heart-rendering stories, and not one of them has told of a cowardly death.
“The women met their fate as did the men, bravely and for the most part with astonishing calmness. A woman told me that she and her husband went into the kitchen and climbed upon the kitchen table to get away from the waves, and that she knelt there and prayed.
“As she prayed, the storm came in and carried the whole house away, and her husband with it, and yesterday she went out to the place where her husband had been, and there was nothing there but a little hole in the ground.
“Her husband’s body was found twisted in the branches of a tree, half a mile from the place where she last saw him. She recognized him by a locket he had around his neck—the locket she gave him before they were married. It had her picture and a lock of the baby’s hair in it. The woman told me all this without a tear or a trace of emotion. No one cries here.
“They will stand and tell the most hideous stories, stories that would turn the blood in the veins of a human machine cold with horror, without the quiver of an eyelid. A man sat in the telegraph office and told me how he had lost two Jersey cows and some chickens.
“He went into minute particulars, told how his house was built and what it cost, and how it was strengthened and made firm against the weather. He told me how the storm had come and swept it all away, and how he had climbed over a mass of wabbling roofs and found a friend lying in the curve of a big roof, in the stoutest part of the tide, and how they two had grasped each other and what they said.
“He told me just how much his cows cost and why he was so fond of them, and how hard he had tried to save them, but I said: ‘You have saved yourself and your family; you ought not to complain.’
“The man stared at me with blank, unseeing eyes.
“‘Why, I did not save my family,’ he said. ‘They were all drowned. I thought you knew that; I don’t talk very much about it.’