“Unfortunately, I was not able to do as much as I should have liked to do. I did accomplish a little, though, more especially in the embarcation of the wounded. They were all being carried up the longest and narrowest sidestairs I have ever seen alongside a ship, sometimes head first, more often with the head down and banged and jostled unmercifully. They were lying alongside for hours, seasick and unhappy, until I tried the old _Relief_ trick. I enlisted the aid of the ships’ officers and used a boat fall, clearing out the small boats in short order and sending the patients up without suffering until I had every gangway crowded. Nothing you have read in the papers nor experienced in San Francisco can give you an adequate idea of the situation down there. It was just one infernal smash and not less than a hundred thousand dead at Messina alone. The wounded were in horrible condition, as gangrene was almost universal.” MISS BROCKIUS AT TAORMINA. Miss Brockius, in a letter to a friend in this country, writes: “If I wrote for hours I could not tell you of the horrors we have seen in the last three days. During the first the long trains came in perhaps every hour with the wounded and the dying, huddled together with the refugees, all with that frightened look of horror in their faces. When they thought the people were dying they would be taken off at our station and we had arranged the waiting room into a place to receive them. When the tables were all full they would have to go on the floor—poor, poor people, sometimes you could hardly see for the blood that they were human beings, and they were mangled beyond words. Some had both legs and both arms broken, and many had not eaten for days, and their thirst was terrible. “We worked over one poor thing for hours, for the doctor said she had no bones broken, and she seemed very young and strong, but she must have been injured internally, for she died without becoming conscious. One man was taken off here who had been in the ruins for four days, of course with nothing to eat. He had to be fed at first with a drop of milk at a time, and in several hours he was able to walk to the carriage. One young fellow’s eyes were glassy with hunger, and after we had given him some hot broth we could see that awful look go away, but, poor thing, he had lost his memory entirely, and did not even know where he had been. “It is so hard for us, not knowing much of the language, to tell what they want. A poor dying soldier was begging me to let him kiss something that was around his neck in a bag, and I couldn’t understand until a priest told me what he wanted. “Many were in open coal cars and, as it has rained almost constantly since the catastrophe, the suffering must have been frightful. “One man who went to Messina to help dig out the people told us it was much worse than a field of battle, for there were so many children lying there injured.” APPRECIATION OF ITALIAN OFFICIALS.