OUR EARTHQUAKE SPECIAL.
By Editor
AS the journal having the largest circulation in the East of any paper published on the Pacific Coast, the publishers of the SIGNS OF THE TIMES believe it duty to issue a special number devoted largely to the great calamity which has befallen the fairest section of the Pacific Coast. They have endeavored to secure accurate accounts from conservative eye-witnesses, after the excitement is over, and reason bears sway. From various localities, cities, towns, and villages, typical of many other places, we give the news by pen and camera. The reader can see to some extent what these cities were and what they are; what they were before the mighty forces of a perverted nature came up out of the earth and seized them in their grasp for a brief one-half minute, and what they are since. The millions in the East will wish to see and know what the thousands of the West are seeing and feeling, many of them in hopeless despair; many, alas! are beyond the seeing and feeling and knowing, crushed into unrecognizable mass, burned in desolating fires, dying in various forms as result of earthquake and holocaust. The fearful cataclysm still seems to many a horrible dream from which they wonder if they will ever waken; or waking find it an even more terrible reality, clasping in its appalling agony and crushing tentacles the years of the future. Many, very many, have no hope in the life or the world beyond this existence and this poor earth; and when the earthquake crushed their building or the fire fiend doomed it, they lost their all. It is to give these simple, heart-rending, heart-touching, awful facts, which, on every hand, stare one in the face, that this paper is printed by those among the losers.