ST. PIERRE’S DAY OF DOOM. I To the Last, the Light-Hearted Population Refused to Believe There Was Danger, Though the Warning Was Ample. The special correspondent of the New York Herald, writing from St, Pierre. Martinique, says: It is not so very long ago that I vis ited this poor St. Pierre—this now city of the dead. It had, I am told, undergone but few changes until the coming of that frightful day which changed it so utterly. Where all is now aching desolation a chaos of ruined walls, blackened stumps of trees and sickening stench, there basked in summer sunshine a little city splashed through with vivid fall, tell of how short-lived the fright was and how quickly the mercurial population regained its buoyant spir its. Some there were who looked grave when ^hes, white and fine as powdered n^mesia, began to sift from the great cloud which hung over Pelee's crest, but it seems that none thought to connect these myriads of floating particles with the deep, muf fled rumble which had Just been heard: none to trace the one to the other—the effect to the cause. Their minds were not grooved to such ZONES OF DESTRUCTIVENESS AT ST. PIERRE AS REPORTED BY UNITED STATES GEOLOGIST. color—red tiled roofs cutting sharp lines on walls of creamy white, yellow and orange and bird’s-eye blue, min gled with the green of tropic verdure. Built on a long undulation, which slop ed to the sea, where it clustered in a riot of color near the shore, its sub urban spots could he picked out here and there along the flanking spurs and foothills which roll from Pelee’B base, that great volcanic bulk whose crest is ever shrouded in a veil of clouds. Over the doomed city the morning of May 1 broke in miracle splendor, skies bright and blue, and foliage washed to a tresher green by a hard rain which had swept over the island the preced.ng night. But it was the last fair day that St. Pierre was to know. The market place, the first section of the city to show life when a West Professor Robert T. Hill. (First Man to Penetrate to the Crater of Mont Pelee and Report on the Eruption.) Indian town awakes, was filling with venders and purchasers, when the first murmur of Pelee, the sleeping giant, was heard—a deep-toned, jarred growl, which instantly blanched the faces of all who heard, for those bred In the shadow of the volcano had long since learned to dread its wrath, and, growing up, these in turn had taught other generations of the malevolent ri that giant bulk. Startled eyes were turned to the gloomy mountain, and were reassured to see it still quiet bo far as vision went, for its top was hidden in a white mist, and there was no sign of boiling lava and no fall of hurtling rocks. Those who by chance were in the city that morning, and who by far luckier hazard were out of it before its analysis; they were too simile, too West Indian for that. Sufficient that the rumble had gone. St. Pierre was gay that night of May 1. The municipal band played music in the plana, as was :ts wont Thurs day evening. This band night was the one when youths and maidens might mingle in public, and the young gallants and mademoiselles, prome nading around the square under tr.e watchful eyes of fathers and mothers and dueunas, talked lightly of Pelee and that whitening fall. Up near Morne Rouge, abode or bt. Pierre’s well-to-do, there was a lawn party that evening, which car ried its gayety far into the night— zitza3 tinkling in the tropic air, and mantilla-draped girls dancing in the moonlight to the click of castanets. Friday, day of the evil omen, dawn ed over St. Pierre. It was made sombre by a thunderstorm, which brooded over the mountains and from whose dark clouds came Intermittent flashes of lightning. The nervous started at every thunderclap and anx iously asked one another if that was not Mont Pelee, while others sought to trace the blinding flashes to their source, to see if they were really the mere play of lightning or volcanic blazes from the time-worn crater, which many believed, and all hoped, was long ago extinct. Then a heavy mist settled over the city and its sur roundings, and under its depressing influence the day wore Itself to a close. Satu’.day, May 3! Just five days to the obliteration, to death, utterly, wholesale, sudden and tragic! And yet St. Pierre went forth that day to carnival doings, local celebration in honor of something or somebody. Facts a-e meager as to that one day and those following, for it must be remembered that nobody survived the horror that was so soon to come. But there were some who had spent days in tne city just previous to the trag edy—some who had left it only a scant half-hour before the holocaust. Grieving for their own lost dead and with nerves unstrung by the narrow ness of their own escape, It may be that their overwrought minds are coining visions now, but these tell ear nestly of a column of smoke which arose, black as a pall, from Pelee’s white shroud to rear its billows of crape into the form ot a great up ended coflin. However that may oe, there is evidence that all festival gay ety went when showers of pebbles be gan to rattle over the city, with now and then a snower of sand, of grains hot to the touch, despite their long flight through the air. St. Pierre, it is now said, was in a more sober humor that evening than it has been within the memory of those who tell disjointedly the tale of the lays that ushered in its doom. And | when on the next morning—Sunday, that was—another growling note was heard from Pelee and a small river of hot, black mud, touched here and there with red, was seen to come snak ing down out of the mists screening Pelee’s summit, to cascade over a hundred-foot precipice and then to follow the line of least resistance un til it swirled about the Guerin factory, setting that building ablaze and des troying many lives, then apprehension grew fhto fear and soon might have lapsed into a panic, which doubtless would have saved through flight the lives of the thousands that were soon to be sacriuced. n was at tnis crisis uiai me nanu of the government appeared. To Fort de France, the seat of local authority, had come reports of the uneasy feel- j Ing of those dwelling in St. Pierre. Martinique’s commercial theater. It is thought that Gov. Mouttet honestly believed there was no cause for alarm and that a pan' in St. Pierre would ; work disaster in many ways, interrupt j iug commerce and injuring the whole island as well as the threatened city. He, if none other, realized that an exodus from the place would be a tacit acknowledgment of the danger that lurked in the volcano, which all in Martinique would have the world believe W£s long ago extinct and never to be restored to the list of still active i nor yet classed with those that are dormant. So it came about that the governor saw fit to exercise moral restraint, it not being within his province or within that ot any ether man to use ' physical force in a matter of this j kind. In St. Pierre there were some gov ernment employes, among these gray beards who had spent years in vol- j canic regions, and wuo knew some- | thing of the preliminary warnings which come from taese excitable hills. When the lava streams came pouring down from Pelee these at once made hurried applications for leaves of absence. The government sought to make an example of the youngest, and in a communication to him denied the application for furlough, and said moreover that if the applicant quitted his post at the time his position would be taken from him. This man —unfortunately, names are hard to obtain now- from Martinique’s hysteri cal population—promptly decided that his life was worth more than his place and, packing up his belongings, went with his family to some point inland, just where no one seems to know-. It seems teat the others were not so hardy, or were more so, according to one’s way of looking at It. At all events, when the government’s dic tum was known all the government employes uecided to remain, and as fear loves company no less than mis ery does, these affected to make light of the danger so as to better Induce the others to remain. Monday, May 5—Less than eighty hours, and the 30,000 Iive3 of St. Pierre are to be blotted out as quickly as one snuffs a candle. Fear is rife among the populace the morning of tnis day and an unwonted silence per vades the city—the hush that precedes a great tragedy. Macaws and parrots squawk discordantly from cages, foun tains tinkle merrily, seas and skies are blue, but pervading all is an air of expectancy—of dread. Few have yet left the city, but it would now take little to turn every street into a struggling stream of hu manity fleeing panic-stricken from the vicinity of that awful volcano. From tales I have heard one can easily conceive of what a trampling rush might have followed some tocsin alarm —such a mad rush for safety as theater crowds are wont to make when the cry of “fire” is heard. But there was none in Martinique to give needed warning—not even Pelee. All that day and the next and the next the volcano smoked, and*at intervals emitted clouds of ashes, finely pulverized pumice the chemists say the ashes are composed of, but the wind sent the smoke and ashes away from the city, and while the roll ing clouds were seen from far-off points and while the ashes fell on the ships half a hundred miles away none in St. Pierre seems to have known that the mountain was even then pouring forth smoke and ashes. What the residents did know was that a commission of geologists had been appointed by the government to | survey Pelee and report upon it— RCEJfB or DEATU AND DESOLATION IN MARTINIQUE. (Official Troncb (otvtaaitot cap of norQutatcxn Marttnfciu*. »Ub potataof pLlaf.lafauft atprtaaot lail.catol) to say whether there was danger there or not. Then, too, the governor was coming, and, moreover, his family was coming with him. Could there possi bly be any danger where so eminent and so important personages as these were? Also a company of soldiers from Fort de France were coming, and while the St. Pierrans were talk ing of their arrival the company ap peared. It seems singular that the presence of this small band of soldiery should have inspired a misplaced confidence, but it was so, though none seems to have asked what good the soldiers could have done, or even the mighti est army have effected against voi canic Pelee. The governor came, and with him his family arrived from Fort de France on the little steamboat Topaz. With the governor came the geologists, the wise men who were to sit in Judg ment and to so fatuously misjudge. They pondered long, and then gave fatal assurance that all was well. The people read the assurances which the papers printed, drew a long breath of relief and then turned their attention to other things, to affairs of business and pleasure and all that goes to make up the indolent, happy life of the pleasure loving natives of this isle. And that night—the night of May 7—the wise men hastened hack to Fort de France. Tne governor and his family were to have followed the next day, the French cruiser Suchet having been di rected to leave her anchorage at Fort de France at 7 o'clock for the purpose of bringing home the governor and his party. That plan, if carried out, would have brought the cruiser to her doom, and her crew will never cease to thank their saints and bless the blun dering mechanic who broke something in the engine-room as the vessel was about getting under way, which acci dent delayed her departure and proba bly saved the lives of all on board. Wednesday night—eve of horror! There are none left alive to tell what the city was like that night, but just around a little promontory at its southern edge nestles the little vil lage of Carbet, a pretty town of some six or seven hundred people. And not one of them was hurt, the town having been screened by the high ridge which lay* between it and St. Pierre and runs sheer to the sea. Its northern wall was precipitous and built close up to it was the south ern section of St. Pierre, a thickly populated district whose houses left strange qnfet of the racked earth. Thomas T. Prentiss, United States consul at St. Pierre, was sitting on the veranda at his home fn the early hours of the following morning. A friend came driving by in a buggy. “You had better get out of this,” he railed to fh