On Monday, a cyclone of extraordinary violence passed over the
Southern States of the American Union. The plane to suffer most was Port Royal, in South Carolina. A wind going at the rate of a hundred miles an hour struck the town like a bomb-shell, and this was followed by a tidal-wave which swept everything before it. In all, one hundred lives were lost, —the Negroes were so panic-stricken that they made little or no effort to save themselves. After the disaster, the town was absolutely isolated, all the wires having been destroyed and the railways washed away. Charleston, a town of sixty-five thousand people, has also been reduced to ruins, though the loss of life was small. The tidal-wave here also did the bulk of the damage, and " swilled" away sea-fronts and gardens as a child with a bucket swills away his sand embankments. Out of the seventy churches in Charleston, not one remains un- injured, and many are completely wrecked. The damage to life and property at Savannah was also very great. The exact course of the cyclone has been ascertained. Its centre crossed Savannah on Sunday night ; Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday morning ; Lynchburg, Virginia, on Monday after- noon; and then, crossing Eastern Pennsylvania on Monday night, it passed on to Lake Ontario on Tuesday. People in England are congratulating themselves upon the fact that they do not live on a great continent, and so do not have great storms. They forget, however, that about 190 years ago "The storm that late o'er pale Britannia past," referred to by Addison, did nearly as much damage as an American cyclone. It almost swept Kent bare of trees.
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