The air was filled with every conceivable missile. Great beams and sleepers of houses went through the air like arrows. Slates from the roofs hurtled over the heads. One of these would have cut off the head of a man as easily as a guillotine. There are thousands of mangled and wounded people in the town. One poor fellow was picked up alive at Texas City. He was cut in fifty places on his body. The tendons of his arms and legs were exposed. Others were hacked as if they had been laid down and scored as cooks score their meats. One-half the dead, perhaps, were relieved of their agony through these missiles of the storm. CRUSHED BY A PIECE OF TIMBER. One poor woman was carrying her child and its head was crushed by a piece of timber. It did not even whimper, yet she carried the dead infant at her breast for three long hours before it was torn from her grasp. When one sees the debris piled twenty feet high, in many places on the backbone of the island—that is, along Q street, running east and west—and when one sees the broad prairies for miles and miles covered with the wreckage that came from Galveston across the bay, the wonder with him will be that anything out on the waters that fearful night escaped to look, not tell, the story of that fearful night. For few can tell it; all look it. Something of the strength of the winds and waves can be known when it is stated that along the beach at Texas cities I saw dead turtles even. Fish floated dead in the bay. They may have come from some wrecked fishing smack, and I am inclined to take this view of it, but there they were, covering a large space with their dead bodies. There were thousands of rats floating about. I saw even dead snakes along the shores. The chickens which lined the beach along the mainland were entirely denuded of their feathers. Not a buzzard or bird was to be seen. Not a mosquito was heard. The wind had carried all winged things away. Down in some parts of the debris the planks and beams and sills of houses had been thrown together with such force that they were driven into each other and made as solid a mass as the most skilled workmen could join two pieces of timber. The foreman of one of the working gangs said it was impossible to remove certain portions of the mass except by clipping it away with axes or by burning it. If such a wind had struck Dallas or any other town in the State, it would not have lasted a moment. Another thing I have been asked by the people of the interior was why the resort to the ocean as a burial ground was had, and why burning was afterward resorted to. When day broke after that night of horror, the people could not realize the immensity of their woe. It required but a short time for them to know it. The first on the streets were the first greeted by the corpses.