The French revolution, with its September and August massacres, its ravages, and its other fiendish details, have been in the hands of Carlyle and a score of French writers; the Gordon riots have been described by Dickens—but never a poet or historian or novelist has drawn anything near as shocking a picture of any event in the past as this stern and frightful reality. Nearly every event of the past which has shocked humanity came about through contests between men. But men tire and men, however bitter, at last will abate their anger. In this case it was helpless humanity on the one side. In this case it was terrible nature in all its fury and strength on the other. There could be no appeal for mercy, because the winds have no ears. There was no resistance, because the arms of the waters were those of a giant demon. There were appeals, but they were directed above the storm. There were struggles, but they were simply those of the drowning. Those who survived were incoherent to a great degree. The wind shrieked; it did not whistle as winds do. They all agree on that. The air was filled with spray, a blinding spray which affected the nostrils and throat and begat an inordinate thirst. It was dark. Yet it was light. They all agree on that. Was there a moon? No one saw it. Yet even late at night they could see the clouds in the sky. The light, they say was a silvery one—a sort of sheen—a strange, and yet to all a fearful kind of light. Only one person ventured an explanation. She said the air was filled with the finest spray, and that this was phosphorescent. There is something in this idea. HOUSE ROCKED LIKE A CRADLE. Did the wind blow straight away or come in gusts? Here they differ again. One man told me that his house rocked as a cradle rocked by a mother getting her half-sleeping child to sleep. Dr. Fly described how it blew in a way to be understood. He was in the Tremont Hotel, a brick structure. He said that while it blew hard all the time gusts would come every few seconds and the wind took the strong building in its teeth then and shook it like a terrier would shake a rat. There is sitting out on the mainland, not far from Texas City, a dredger which was employed about the wharves at Galveston. This vessel is a mile and a half or two miles from the water now. One of the men aboard told me that the boat was anchored with a steel rope. The Kendall Castle, a large iron steamer, dragged her anchor across this steel rope and cut it as a thread. “On my word,” said the man who told me this, “the moment the steel rope was cut the dredger seemed lifted in the air, and it appeared scarcely a minute till she was where she is now.”