"At first they seemed stunned to partial insensibility by the very magnitude of their grief--as a man who has been mangled almost unto death in a railroad disaster is said to be oblivious to pain. Dead citizens lay by thousands amid the wreck of their homes, and raving maniacs searched the _débris_ for their loved ones, with the organized gangs of workers. Corpses, dumped by barge-loads into the Gulf, came floating back to menace the living; and the nights were lurid with incinerations of putrefying bodies, piled like cord-wood, black and white together, irrespective of age, sex, or previous condition. At least four thousand dwellings had been swept away, with all their contents, and fully half of the population of the city was without shelter, food, clothes, or any of the necessaries of life. Of these, some were living in tents; others crowded in with friends hardly less unfortunate; many half-crazed, wandering aimlessly about the streets, and the story of their sufferings, mental and physical, is past the telling. Every house that remained was a house of mourning. Of many families every member had been swept away. Even sadder were the numerous cases where one or two were left out of recently happy households; and saddest of all was the heart-breaking suspense of those whose friends were numbered among the 'missing.' "We find it hard enough to lay away our dead in consecrated ground, with all the care and tenderness that love can suggest, where we may water the sacred spot with our tears and place upon it the flowers they loved in life; but never to know whether their poor bodies were swallowed by the merciless Gulf, or fed to the fishes with those grewsome barge-loads, or left above ground to become an abomination in the nostrils of the living, or burned in indiscriminate heaps with horses and dogs and the mingled ashes scattered to the winds--must indeed have been well-nigh unbearable. No wonder there were lunatics in Galveston, and unnumbered cases of nervous prostration. "After weeks had passed and two thousand men, aided by several hundred teams, had partially reduced the mountain of wreckage, cremation fires yet burned continuously--fed not only by human bodies, but by thousands of carcasses of domestic animals. By that time, in the hot, moist atmosphere of the latitude, decomposition had so far advanced that the corpses--which at first were decently carried in carts or on stretchers, then shoveled upon boards or blankets--had finally to be scooped up with pitchforks, in the hands of negroes, kept at their awful task by the soldiers' bayonets. And still the 'finds' continued, at the average rate of seventy a day. The once beautiful driving beach was strewn with mounds and trenches, holding unrecognized and uncoffined victims of the flood; and between this improvised cemetery and a ridge of _débris_, three miles long and in places higher than the houses had been, a line of cremation fires poisoned the air.