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Show THE FOUNTAINS OF ST PIERRE. An account of St. Pierre after the great cataclysm, cata-clysm, says: "Amid all the desolation the fountains foun-tains continue to play." The houses were all destroyed, de-stroyed, every tree was blasted and half consumed; con-sumed; the beautiful foliage was all gone; the bright-plumaged birds that had sung in the trees were all extinct; the dreadful place was utterly annihilated an-nihilated and soundles, save the murmur of the fountains that continued to play. All their outer works had been smitten by the fiery gases and fouled by the ashes and scoria that the explosions explo-sions of the mountain had hurled upon the doomed city, but the fountains continued to play as when the happy children played around them and the birds sang their love-songs in the trees above them. Being fed from beneath the ground, the pipes that supplied them escaped the catastrophe that smote everything upon and above the earth's surface. It was as though they were saved that pity might shedier tears through them. The account reminds one of an old man that is sometimes seen on the streets of this city. He totters rather than walks, every trace of comliness has disappeared from him; his hands are gnarled like the dead limbs of some old tree; his complexion com-plexion has a leathery look, but the pipes of his heart are still working- and give a little moisture to his eyes and supply the strength to his cracked voice to repeat what hei calls a hymn and which he says he composed in the long ago. Youth an'i manhood and the hopes of youth and manhood are as dead in his soul as were the corpses around tho fountains of St. Pierre, but as the fountains keep playing through their blasted frames, so the old man chatters the hymn, which has remained to him. Through it perhaps he hears voices that are no more; possibly the ghosts of long dead hopes flit before his bleared eyes as he chatters the halting halt-ing lines and in one respect he is a sadder spectacle than tho ruined city presented, for there a merciful merci-ful and painless death hushed all animal life in a moment of time, gave the place up to death and utter desolation and there was no more waiting for the end. |