The official accounts of the mortality in Galveston reduce the
number of ascertained deaths to four thousand five hundred, but this appears to be independent of the returns from many scattered villages, which are said by the Governor of Texas to bring the total of deaths up to twelve thousand. In one watering-place with a thousand houses, mostly of wood, every house was destroyed, and four hundred persons killed at once. The ruin appears to have been even more complete than was reported, and has induced some eminent firms in London, with Messrs. Baring at their head, to open a sub- scription for sufferers by "a calamity which cannot be exaggerated." It is most improbable, it should be recollected, that the people of Galveston were insured against flood or cyclones, and that method of distributing, and therefore alleviating, loss, which helped ta revive the energy of Chicago when the city was burned, is necessarily absent.
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