The truth as it drips in from Martinique is worse
than the worst rumours. At 7.30 on May 8th the volcano, La Pelee, at the north end of the island, which had been threatening, and indeed exploding, for some days, burst out in furious eruption. The top of the mountain was seen to open, and in a moment a torrent of fire, burning gases, and hot ashes was pouring over St. Pierre, the little Liverpool of the island. The citizens inhaled the blazing gas, and " died like flies," most of them with some scrap of linen before , their mouths ; the town was enveloped in a fire so intense, that its destruction took' only minutes; and the ships in the harbour were drowned in burn- ing matter, only one escaping' with the loss of nearly half its crew. The whole populaticei, thirty thousand in number, is believed to have been destroyed, for though canoes with three hundred men and women on board are reported to have reached St. Lucia, it is probable that they escaped from villages on the coast. La Pelee , by the latest accounts was still unquiet, the entire northern division of the island had been burned up, and the country- side is covered many inches deep with ashes and hot lava. There is alarm for Fort de France, the capital of the island, and St. Lucia, Dominica, and. Barbados are drowned in a heavy rain of dust. It is to be feared that the prosperity of the French colony, which was great, is finally at an end, though no doubt in fifty years dark men will again be swarming in the cane-fields. There have been greater sudden extinctions of human life even in our time, but none so visible to Europe, or attended with such ghastly ;circumstances, the ghastliest of all perhaps being that many hundreds must have died of thirst. The springs dried up.
