direction of the open sea. Immediately the captain brought his vessel round so as to meet the wave stern foremost. After a moment of most piquant anxiety, we found ourselves lifted up with terrific speed; our vessel bounded upward, and then we felt ourselves plunged into the abyss. But the wave had passed us and we were out of all danger. Like a high mountain the gigantic wave sped furiously towards the shore, while immediately after three other great waves followed it. The waters rushed in and destroyed the town, sweeping away first the light house, which fell in like a pack of cards, then all the buildings beyond. In a few moments all was over, and where once Telok Betong stood there was nothing but water.” Livid with terror, the captain steamed rapidly to warn the town of Anjer. There was no longer an Anjer, a Dutch fort, a garrison. A single sailor, who had caught a floating tree, stalked about among the corpses. Krakatoa, which had opened this fearful carnival of death, sank slowly into the sea. Of the island, twenty-five miles long and seventeen wide, a small portion of the terribly shattered cone remained in sight. New islets were made; vast shoals created. Sailors discovered new islands and landed, only to find themselves on vast floating pumice rafts, miles from land. New charts had to be made. For a time the seas were hardly navigable. Such is the story. The damage to property was millions of dollars. The loss of life will never be definitely known. First estimates placed it at 80,000. Conservative judges pronounced it in all probability between 50,000 and 60,000. The explosions were heard as far away southward as Australia; to the westward as far as Southern India; to the eastward, they are said to have been heard in the Caribbean Sea. Even if we reject the latter, we may take the others, and obtain some idea by imagining volcanoes at St. Louis to be heard at New York and San Francisco, at Mexico and in Hudson’s Bay. The great sea wave rushed from Krakatoa to the Mauritius in eight hours. It rolled around the coasts of the Australian continent, dashing into the southern harbors, sweeping through the narrow Bass Straits. It rose and fell upon Hawaiian coasts in a perplexing manner. It surged against South America; against East Africa; it rounded Cape Horn and made itself known on the coasts of France, upon our Atlantic shore. It encircled the world--the greatest sea wave ever known. The volcanic, microscopic dust remained long in the air, and occasioned the singular redness of the sky at morn and eve that prevailed throughout the world for the next two years. Apart from this suspended dust, the volcano threw out as much matter as the Mississippi bears to the gulf in two hundred and fifty years.