A TERRIBLE SPECTACLE.

Within five minutes of the explosion I was able, by means of a special police pass, to reach the actual scene of the disaster at a time when the prostrate bodies of the victims, some in the death agony and others quite still were lying where they fell. Every shop and lobby in the vicinity was the scene of first-aid to bleeding men, women, boys and girls. Some of the bodies placed in the ambulances were so mangled as to be unrecognisable. A great hole in the middle of Wall Street marked the spot where the horse and wagon containing the explosive had been.

The immediate witnesses of the explosion being either killed or wounded, it was impossible in the first instance to ascertain precisely what had occurred. Some favoured a story of an attempt to destroy Messrs. Morgan’s offices, but a more reliable version I found on later investigation is that a van loaded with explosives, to be used for blasting rock in the foundations for the New York Stock Exchange building just across the street from Morgan’s, collided with a motor-car, and the explosion arose from the impact.

Within an hour and a half of the explosion, when I revisited the scene of the disaster, I found a battalion of United States infantry, with bayonets fixed, in charge of the Treasury, immediately opposite Messrs. Morgan’s, and the entire financial district was surrounded by a cordon of police. Financiers, brokers, and clerks with linen-swathed heads or hands, were still limping from the offices in the neighbourhood, and ambulances, horsed and motor-propelled, were rushing to the hospitals with the more serious cases.