NEWS OF THE WEEK.
MHE South American mails bring intelligence of a catastrophe almost without a parallel in modern history. Two thousand ladies have been burnt alive in the capital of Chili. On the 8th December, the last day of the festival of the Immaculate Conception, some three thousand ladies of Santiago, mostly of the higher classes, with several hundred men, crowded into the cathedral to attend the special service. The church, a wooden one, was lighted with twenty thousand tapers, arranged in festoons and hung .with drapery ,which, just as the service began, caught fire. The flames spread in an instant round the building, the mass of candles gave it volume and intensity, the roof began to sputter, the men, panic-stricken, rushed like a herd of bullocks to the door, crushing the women in their passage, the roof kept dropping fire, and in less than a quar- ter of an hour two thousand women were charred, black, and dead. Two hundred cart-loads of corpses were carried out, and there can be scarcely a family of note in Chili which has not lost a representative. The great majority of the victims must have died of suffocation, the smoke from the Anuning diaperies completely filling the church.
