The friends and relatives of those who were lost when the great liner went down were urged not to assume the ordeal of meeting the Mackay-Bennett. Almost without exception they followed this advice, and only a scattering few could be seen among those waiting on the pier. In all the crowd of men, officials, undertakers, and newspaper men, there was just one woman, solitary, spare, clasping her heavy black shawl tightly around her. This was Eliza Lurette, for more than thirty years in the service of Mrs. William August Spencer, who was waiting at her home on East Eighty-sixth Street, New York, while Miss Lurette had journeyed to Halifax to seek the body of Mr. Spencer, who went down with the Titanic. So the crowd that waited on the pier was made up almost entirely of men who had impersonal business there, and the air was full of the chatter of conjecture and preparation. Then, warned by the tolling of the bells up in the town, a hush fell upon the waiting people. The gray clouds that had overcast the sky parted, and the sun shone brilliantly on the rippling water of the harbor as the Mackay-Bennett drew alongside her pier. THE DEAD LAY EVERYWHERE. Capt. Lardner could be seen upon the bridge. The crew hung over the sides, joyously alive and glad to be home. But in every part of the ship the dead lay. High on the poop deck coffins and rough shells were piled and piled. Dead men in tarpaulins lined the flooring of the cable-wells both fore and aft, so that there was hardly room for a foot to be put down. And in the forward hold dead men were piled one upon another, their eyes closed as in sleep, and over them all a great tarpaulin was stretched. Those that pressed forward to see were sickened and turned back. The business of moment was to discharge that freight, and this was done with all possible dispatch. The uncoffined dead were carried down in stretchers, placed in the rough shells that were piled upon the pier, and one by one driven up the slope and into the town in the long line of hearses and black undertaker’s wagons that had been gathered from every quarter. It was speedily done, but quietly and without irreverent haste. For two hours this business proceeded before anyone could go upon the pier and the sounds were like the hum of a small factory. There were the muffled orders, the shuffling and tramping of feet, the scraping as of packing boxes drawn across the rough flooring and the eternal hammering that echoed all along the coal sheds. Two hours it was before any one could go on board, and then came another hour when the coffins were swung down from the deck and piled up on the wharf ready for the removal that took until well into the middle of the afternoon. Few of the relatives were allowed to pass beyond the cordon that stretched all about the pier at which the dead were landed.