The Dawson news. (Dawson, Ga.) 1889-current, 1897-02-10
FURNI1RE, CARPETS Al
that it is difficult to describe it correctly

hat it is difficult to describe it correctly
and hope to be believed.
"These warehouses are built on wooden
piles, about fifty yards from the waters
edge. Half of the roof of one has fallen
in, carrying the flooring with it. and the
adobe walls and one side of the sloping
roof and the high wooden piles on which
half of the floor once rested are all that
remain. Some time ago an unusually
high tide swept in under these ware
houses and left pool of water hun
dred yards long and as wide around the
wooden piles, and it has remained there
undisturbed. This pool is now covered
half an inch thick with green slime.
Blue and yellow gases have covered 1t
in spots, and damp fungus growth has
spread over the wooden posts and up the
sides of the walls.
"Over this sewerage are now living
three hundred women and children. The
floor beneath them has rotted away and
the planks have broken and fallen into
the pool, leaving big gaps through which
rise day and night damp stenches and
poisonous exhalations. The people above
it are not ignorant of their situations.
They know they are living over death
trap, but there is no other place for them
to go.
"Bands of guerrillas and flying col
umns have driven them like sheep into
this city, and, with no money and no
chance to obtain work, they haYe taken
shelter in the only place left open to
them. With planks and blankets and
bits of old sheet iron they have, for the
sake of decency, put up barriers across
these abandoned warehouses, and there
they are now, sitting on the floor or
stretched on heaps of rags, gaunt and
hollow-eyed.
"Old negroes and little white children,
some of them as beautiful in spite of
their rags as any children l ever saw,
act as the providers fer this helpless col
ony. They beg the food and ga her the
sticks and do the cooking. Inside the
old women and young mothers sit on the
rotten planks listless and silent, staring
ahead of them at nothing.
PTTIABLE SCENES IN A HosPITABLE.
81 found the hLspitable of this colony
behind three blankets which had been
hung across a corner of the warehouse.
A young woman and a man were lying
side by side. The others sat within a
few feet of them, on the other side of
the blanket, apparently lost to all sense
of their danger and too detected and
hopeless to even raise their eyes when I
gave them money. A fat little doctor
was caring for the sick women and he
pointed through the cracks in the floor
to the green slime below, and aid his
fingers to his nose and shrugged his
shoulders. asked him what allied his
patients, and he saidi was yellow fever,
and pointed again at the slime which
moved and dubbed in the hot sun.
"He showed me babies with the skin
drawn so tightly over their little bodies
that the bones showed through as plain
ly as the fingers under glove. They
we're covered with red sores, and pro-
tested as loudly as they could against
the treatment the world was giving
them, clinching their fists and sobbing
with pain when the sore places came in
contact with their mothers arms. A
planter, who had at one time employed q
large number of these people, and who
was moving abont among them, said
that 500 had died in Cardenas since the
order to leave the field had been issu-
ed.
81 saw the survivors of the Johnstown