The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-12-16

Luck broke well for me on the hur- ried assignment to the trail of the tropical hurricane.
 An Associated Press "flash" had come to the News Editor limiting of the horror of the Gulf storm. Ii was sent while the angry sea was still hat-a tling to beat down the handiwork of man, while the gale still shrieked and tore at the houses that sheltered him his women and his children.
 The few words in the flash" said that death was riding in the storm, but it's words were vague and hazy. They were so indefinite that their ac- curacy was under suspicion. But if they were true, if men were battling with the primal clements and dying in the strife--a great news story was shaping for pencil and telegraph click CT.
 caught the assignment scant half hour before train time and in light marching order I took a midnight Pullman. But would we get through to the storm struck coast? The rail- road men doubted it. The wires were down and railroad without wires is a Samson shorn of his strength. The philosophical thing to do was to go to bed without worrying over possible breaks in the track and take luck as it came.
 But luck broke we'll. I walked with the sun shining brilliantly on the Flor ida pine flats. There Is no sunshine so soft and so warm as the golden glory that breaks upon the wind swept and rain soaked earth wheE a storm has broken and passed. No day is so fair--no sun light so shot with gold the sunlight that breaks upon the earth when it has quivered in the dark terror of the storm and trembled in the roar and the flash of the elemental artillery.
 At no other time does the earth so show its dependence and It's trust In it's far off lover. And at no other time is the earth like an enamored girl who loving has doubted and suffered and who finding her doubts made of no stauncher fabric than her jealous fancy, smiles through the wet traces of her recent suffering and Is happy, The calmness of contentment, the peace which comes after an ordeal encountered, endured and passed, is the calmness, the. contentment and the peace that shows in earth's face, when the sun all golden, comes to woo 1t from the memory of the dark violence of the night
 The storm had been so recent, that as we rolled through the sunlit plains of Florida the engineer was suspicious of his track and alert for some omi- nous sign of trouble Miles from the
 
 its fury. The eye could reach no place in which no prostrate pine was seen. Fences which had stood prim and straight lay tangled upon the ground and their dejected disgrace be- spoke the violence of the gale. We read in the loose blinds and battered verandahs of the occasional frame house, the smashing force of the gale that came upwards from the sea.
 Aboard the Pullman we knew noth- ing of the storm, beyond what was contained in the Hurried rumor that came over the wire, and what we could read from the window in the pine woods and on the. farms. What lay along the coast-what pitiful sights the sun shone upon where land and sea met was beyond our knowl- edge.
 lone hackman met the train In the middle of the morning-for this train the first to reach the depot af- ter the storm was so out of harmony with it's schedule that no other hack man and no hotel porter guessed cor rectly the hour of its arrival In the streets by the depot and in the yards hard by trees were blown down and wires were twisted in a hopeless tam gle.
 The first tangible information.- the first definite assurance that the trip so hurriedly taken was not In vain came from the lone hackman's af- liability to his fare when the newly arrived fare said questioningly:
 Looks like you've had a bad storm here"
 Bad storm, Boss. bad storm" the hackman answered with enthusiastic pride in the new distinction the city had achieved in it's maritime misfor- tune. Say, Boss. you sho orter go down on de water front. Disshere what you see ain't nothin' 10 that's down