The story of the Sun, New York: 1833-1928 / by Frank M. O'Brien ; with an introduction by Edward Page Mitchell ...

262

THE STORY OF "THE SUN"

waves no more, let us hope that Wiig gets another
Snyg for the sake of the bards ashore.
Surely a collection of Sun stories would include the
masterpiece of Thomas M. Dieuaide on the destruction
of St. Pierre in 1902, beginning:
FORT DE FRANCE, MARTINIQUE, May 21-To-day
we saw St. Pierre, the ghastliest ghost of the modern
centuries. But yesterday the fairest of the fair of
the wondrous cities of the storied Antilles, bright,
beautiful, glorious, glistening and shimmering in her
prism of tropical radiance, an opalescent city in a
setting of towering forest and mountain, now a waste
of ashen-gray without life, form, color, shape, a drear
monotone, a dim blur on tie landscape-it seelms
even more than the contrast between life and death.
The dead may live. St. Pierre is not alive, and
never will be. Out of shape has come a void. It is
the apotheosis of annihilation. To one who sits
amid the ruins and gazes the long miles upward over
the seamed sides of Ia Pelee, still thundering her
terrible wrath, may come some conception of the
future ruin of the worlls.
It has been a (lay of sharp imlprtssions, one cutting into another until the nlemolry-l)a( of th(e mind is
crossed and criss-crossed like the fissured flanks of
La Pelee herself; but most (leeply graven of all,
para(loxically, is the mem(nory of a (limnness, a nothingness, an emptiness, a lack of everything-the gray
barrenness unrelieved of what was the rainbow St.
Pierre. Mont Pelee, the most awful evi(lence of natural force to be seen in the world to-day-La I'ele,
majestic, terrible, overlowering, has been in evidence
from starlight to starlight, but it is the ashen blank
that was once the city of the Saint of the Rock that