My friends are those who went through the awful experience of the cataclysm. I know as well as mortal man can know any thing that this island is no longer a target for the elements. I know that a target like this devastated island could no longer invite the shafts of the elements, even if the elements were endowed with human or divine intelligence. And I know in the simple faith of humanity that the God who “plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm” would reach out with his omnipotent arm and throttle the agencies of nature if they should again aggravate wind and wave to vent their wrath upon these desolate shores. I know that if the sorrows of this community, what remains of it, have thrilled humanity, they must have touched the wellsprings of divine mercy and sympathy, and that the helpless victims who have survived the tragedy of this moment may feel safe from another attack from the remorselessness of the storm. LIGHTNING FLASHES IN DARKNESS. Galveston, stricken and bleeding, is safe from the wrath of all powers, human or divine. The vivid lightnings may cleave the sleepless waves of the sea and the thunders may play at will among the fantastic clouds in the sky. Galveston, soothed and compassed by the tenderness of mankind, is veiled in the folds of heaven’s mercy, and the shrieking tempest is now but a whisper from the sky, the angry wave but the gentle falling of tears from above the stars. It is so hard to write the story or a chapter of it without feeling the power that appalls human intelligence, just as it is hard to disassociate overwhelming sorrow from that broad sympathy which we do not understand, but which never fails to nestle close to human misery. Call it what you may, it is part of human life, and its presence comes when disaster overwhelms to bring humanity in the presence of God. Who can dispute this in the presence of the all-pervading mystery of the storm? Who can laugh to scorn the sympathy whose manifestations have already reached the widows and orphans, whose desolate lives now find comfort from the realms above? This is not a matter of appealing to emotion. I have before me this minute four rings. The man who brings them tells me that they were taken from rigid fingers, among the 700 who on last Monday were sunk to rest amid the borderless fathoms of the sea. He says they may be the means of identification of three lost ones. No; there can be no identification; but who can tell the tender secrets which these circlets pledged? Identification is impossible deep down among the mysteries of the sea.