As was to be expected considering the magnitude of the disaster, the batch of papers just to hand have more or less authetic descriptions of the terrible cataclysm which has wrought such appalling devastation in one of the fairest islands of the West Indies, The graphic description of the destruction of St Pierre given by the special Correspondent of the "Daily Mail" is well worth reproducing. He received the account from an eye-witness who miraculously escaped. He says:—
First of all there was an awful roar and an explosion. I looked up and saw a vast whirling cloud of smoke bigger than the mountain itself come out of the crater and rush down on the city and the It was not ordinary smoke, but a horrible choking smoke that killed all that it wrapped in it, and tore the masts out of the ships and sank them. Right after came a bigger mass of fire that burned the whole city at once. In three minutes all was over, but for an hour I saw people rushing about in the flames on shore and then dropping dead. Not one single person who was in the city at the time of the explosion has lived to tell the awful story afew only in the roadstead escaped. From the stories of the few persons who, in spite of great injuries, still survive, the above version of the disaster is substantially confirmed. The explosion was caused by the ejection of a vast body of volcanic the root and branch order if it is to) be of any value at all. The military spirit of our vast Empire, of the Home Lands, of the Great Colonies, of India, of every little spot on the} earth'
surface over which flies the! Union Jack, is admirable. The fund of strength is immense, irresistible— gases, some of which were blazing with intense heat, which poisoned and burned everything in its path. All agree that the whirlwind of fire in sweeping down from the mountain over the city and across to the roadstead, took less than five minutes in its passage, but even in that time orerything was set on fire and even the very water of the sea made like a boiling cauldron. For three hours the ruins blaze ed, and then no sound was heard within ts limits save the roars of the volcano, the crash of falling stones, and the ceaseless onrush of ashes, fire, and steam. 'A dispatch received in Paris from Fort de France states that there are 30,000 dead bodies in the streets of St. Pierre.
is also announced from the same place that out of twenty burned persons brought to the military hospital here in a dying condition, four only may be saved. On Sunday morning there was still an immense veil of leaden coloured mist over the island, and the sea was full of dead bodies, trees, flotsam and jetsam of every kind. Out among the waves, the sharks were battling for the dead bodies, and seagull were flying around the wre jin myriads. Houses are still burning in St. Pierre, and the air is im togated with the odour of calcined flesh. Bodies found in the streets had their faces turned towards the earth, and in many in~ Stances hands wote placed to mouths aa if to prevent suffocation. Whole families vere found huddled together near devasted dwellings. A French sailor who escaped from destruction states that ho saw a whole cyclone of smoke and fire after the explosion. The smoke killed plo as well as the fire, and the inhabi-fants fell like flies as they were trying to flee towards 2 place of safety. Another survivor says that the sea was boiling near {he shore soon after the burning mountain had belched forth its smoke and flame.
The "Saturday Review" makes the following trenchant remarks on the "fury slinging ame" which has desolated the "gem of the Antilles" as Martinique has been so aptly termed All accounts of the holocaust in Martinjigue agteo in this: alike they who have seen the thing and they who have heard about it from eye-witnesses find no words adequate to the immensity and terror of it. Not only can language not express, but the mind itself, on whose retina can be figured catastrophes we are wont to regard as crushing, cannot take in the fall purport of what has happened: the imagination is unequal to the task. And yet Nature has put forth not her band to accomplish this ruin, merely her little finger. The force she has brought to bear to strike dead a population and its city, and to make perhaps for ages to come, part of a fertile island barren, is no greater to her than is the exertion to us of killing a fly upon the pane. How trifle ing an incident in the history of the world, unworthy perhaps of permanent record apart from its effect on mankind, is this renewal of activity in one or two volcanoes of the West Indian Islands, the slightest thought about the story of the earth makes clear, Even in our own land, as any igneous rock in Cumberland, Wales or Scotland can stow, is evidence of con-pulsion infinitely greater than has just Swept away St. Pierre and has made pos sibly a wilderness of the island of St. Vincent: and such convulsion, though we may think comfortably of it as being of the utterly remote past, took place dur ing after all only Nature's yesterday. The reawakening after long slumber of the volcano of Mount Pélée is but a faint muttering of the angry spirit of the earth, with a stroke of two of her fire: but how greater and how infinitely more sudden and complete is its power for evil over mankind than any Turt mankind in fits of fury can do itself! Sicilian Vespers is on record as' one of the greatest and swift est horrors of history: but a matter of hours was taken to wipe out only a fourth as many people jas are known to have perished in a few minutes at St. Pierre.
The September Massacres on a still smaller scale were spread over four days or more the bell of St. Germain _I'Auxerrois was not set pealing till the tare genius for
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.