346 To the River Plate and Back 



remains of what ten years ago was said to be the most 

 enchanting of the cities of the West Indies, a diminutive 

 Paris, set in the midst of tropical verdure and beauty. 

 The gray mountain with the steam pouring out of the 

 rents in its top and forming clouds about its summit is 

 Pelee, the Destroyer ; the ruins in the foreground are all 

 that is left of the gay little city of St. Pierre. The 

 Captain, who was standing beside me, told me of the 

 awful scene, as he had looked upon it a few days after 

 the holocaust in which forty thousand human lives 

 were snuffed out in an instant. The details of the 

 eruption have been fully told by the late Dr. Angelo 

 Heilprin in his book entitled Mont Pelee, and the Tragedy 

 of Martinique. The only consoling thought which 

 arises in the mind is the reflection that the poor victims 

 were not left to suffer long. Death in a most appalling 

 form overwhelmed them, but it W 7 as " in a moment, in the 

 twinkling of an eye." With one fierce burst the hot, 

 burning sulphur-fumes, pouring from the bowels of the 

 earth, swept down the flanks of the mountain with the 

 speed of a hurricane, and all was over. But one man, a 

 prisoner immured in a deep dungeon, survived out of the 

 multitude. Of the heat and corroding power of that 

 sulphur blast I saw a singular proof a few years ago in 

 the city of Paris. Mons. Alfred Lacroix, the Curator 

 of the collection of minerals at the National Museum in 

 the Jardin des Plantes, showed me a keg of nails which he 

 had found among the ruins at St. Pierre on the site of a 

 hardware-store. The keg had been standing open when 

 the death-dealing storm descended. The learned 

 doctor has removed a stave in the side of the keg to 

 permit the examination of the contents from the top 

 to the bottom. At the bottom of the keg the nails are 

 bright, new, and clean ; but the nails in the upper half of 



