Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 онлайн

115 страница из 136

Where but thirty hours since was the rich and prosperous theater of a great and productive commerce, where enterprise and wealth energized with bold and commanding efforts, now sits despondency in sackcloth and a wide and dreary waste of desolation reigns.

It seemed as if God were running in his anger and sweeping away with the besom of his wrath the proudest monuments of man. Destruction traveled and triumphed on every breeze, and billows of fire rolled over and buried in their burning bosoms the hopes and fortunes of thousands. Like the devouring elements when it fed on Moscow’s palaces and towers, it was literally a “sea of fire,” and the terrors of that night of wo and ruin rolling years will not be able to efface.

The merchants of the First Ward, like Marius in the ruins of Carthage, sit with melancholy moans, gazing at the graves of their fortunes, and the mournful mementoes of the dreadful devastation that reigns.

On the afternoon of the following day the Sun got out an extra edition of thirty thousand copies, its normal morning issue of twenty-three thousand being too small to satisfy the popular demand. The presses ran without stopping for nearly twenty-four hours.