An interesting incident of this great explosion was staged at Ellis Island. There were a goodly number of immigrants on the Island at the time, congregated from the four corners of the earth, some of whom had come to America to seek their fortunes in this land of freedom-from-everything-except-freedom, but many had come to find quiet and security from war's alarums. Few of them, indeed, had ever felt the comfort of an overcoat, but many had dreamed of some happy day when they would sport a veritable fur-lined overcoat. When the great explosion came it sounded like the crack of doom, and most of the immigrants believed it to be the real thing and proceeded with agitated precipitation to get their souls ready for rapid transit over the Great Divide. All eyes naturally were averted to the celestial concave, aglare with the great conflagration, when suddenly, to the confounding amaze of all, a large flock of fur-lined overcoats began tumbling down out of the heavens all over the Island. It is true they were lined merely with sheep's fur, but even such a garment is as much the pride of the Northern European peasant as is the broad, glad-colored sombrero the pride of the Mexican peon. As the Government statute books and rules and regulations governing immigrants contain no provision for the disposal of such species of manna as heaven-sent overcoats, the immigrants were the beneficiaries. Great as are such explosions as that at Pleasant Prairie and that in New York Harbor, they are but little things indeed compared with the explosions that sometimes accompany volcanic eruptions. Mother Earth is the greatest of all explosive manufacturers. Water seeping down into the earth's crust and trapped in large quantities in the neighborhood of volcanoes sometimes becomes heated to high incandescence--heated until it is no longer water or steam, but mingled oxygen and hydrogen, far above the temperature of their dissociation--under a pressure so great that they occupy a space no larger than the original water; consequently the entrapped waters exert a pressure as great as the strongest dynamite. The most notable volcanic explosion that ever occurred in historic time was when that old extinct volcano, Krakatoa, in the Straits of Sunda, that had been sleeping for thousands of years, was literally blown into the sky by the pressure of the pent-up gases beneath it.