"In that Rag Fair department of old clothes, the ludicrous and pathetic called for an equal blending of smiles and tears. It seemed as if every household, from Maine to California, from the St. Lawrence to the Rio Grande, had rummaged its attics for the flood sufferers. Merchants delivered themselves of years' accumulations of shop-worn goods--streaked, faded, of fashions long gone by--but a great deal better than nothing for the destitute. There were at least a million shirtwaists, all thin and summery, though cold winter was at hand, when frequent 'northers' chill the very marrow in one's bones, and ice and snow are not unknown on Galveston Island. There was another million of 'Mother Hubbard' wrappers, all of the sleaziest print and scrimpest pattern, with inch-wide hems at bottom and no fastening to speak of--wrappers enough to disfigure every female in Southern Texas. Fancy a whole city full of women masquerading in those shapeless garments--the poorest of their class; and then remember that, a few years ago, the great and glorious State of Pennsylvania found it necessary to pass a law--presumably for the peace of mind of her male citizens--forbidding the wearing of 'Mother Hubbards' in the street! "One day there came to our warehouse a large case of beautiful, buttoned shoes, of the kind called 'Sorosis.' 'What a bonanza!' we thought, when that box was opened--and through our minds went trooping a procession of the shoeless feet we had longed to comfort. But behold! every blessed shoe of the one hundred and forty-four was for the left foot! "There was an enormous box from a city laundry, containing the unclaimed 'washings' of many years--hundreds of waiters' aprons and cooks' caps, worn hotel towels and napkins, ragged shirts and collars--not a thing worth the lumber in the box, except as old linen for the hospitals. There was a great deal of bedraggled finery, than which nothing could have been less appropriate, when nine out of every ten women who applied for clothes, wanted plain black in which to mourn for their dead. And the hats and bonnets were of every shape and style within the memory of man! They were mostly so crushed in careless packing that to have worshiped them would have been no sin, according to Scripture, as they were no longer in the 'likeness of anything in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth.' There were workmen's blouses and overalls, evidently shed in haste, under a sudden impulse of generosity--plastered with grease, paint, and mortar, and odoriferous of that by which honest bread is said to be earned.