A DEVASTATED SECTION.

Much damage was done in a little block of about five shops. The first belongs to a family named Grant, and is devoted to the sale of papers, books, and postcards. Mrs Grant herself I met coming away from the mortuary later, where, with a friend, she had been to fulfil the painful task of identifying her daughter, whom she described as “a dear girl” of about ten. Next door was a small restaurant, where the proprietor and his wife escaped, but a couple having tea there were killed, and it is believed that they had with them a baby, as a little shoe has been found in the debris, and there is also a ghastly story of a tiny hand picked up some yards away. A small greengrocer’s shop shows the pears and plums, the marrows and lettuces all mixed up with splintered glass and fallen plaster, and a boot repairer’s place is in similar confusion. As usual, it is one of the poorer quarters which has suffered most cruelly. In Guildford Road, the houses for the most part are let at this time of year as lodgings. Hardly a window back or front remains here, while a corner house, occupied as a little general store, is simply a wreck. In another case, a house has gone, leaving a blank where it stood, and exposing, as in a sectional diagram, the sitting room and bed room, with the large bed and little cot duly made up with their clean white coverlet sheets. It is said that in one of these houses the lodgers had gone out, and on their return their chief trouble was that they had lost all their clothes and belongings.