With men and women dying in her ghostly streets, New York saw day breaking through the wild clouds yesterday morning. Nature had overwhelmed the metropolis, and citizens were found dead in the mighty snowdrift

Within forty-eight hours the city was converted into an Arctic wilderness, cut off from all railway and telegraph communication. The white hurricane had strewn her busiest thoroughfares with wreck and ruin. Courts of justice were closed and the vast machinery of commerce was paralyzed.

Below Zero

Just after dawn yesterday the snow ceased to fall, but the great wind that had roared ceaselessly for two days and two nights still shook the earth and whirled flakes upward again in weird, fantastic shapes. At six o’clock the thermometer was one degree below zero.

Thousands upon thousands of men, wrapped in the oddest of costumes that imagination can picture, turned out to dig paths through the streets. In many places the diggers had to cut through gigantic drifts in order to release people who were imprisoned in their own houses.

Tremendous hills of snow were thrown up in the streets, and between them were paths through which the population crept along. Sometimes these hills were so high that a man would walk for half a block without being able to see anything but the sullen sky above him. Horses were employed in dragging away the fallen trees and telegraph poles. Thousands of abandoned wagons were dug out and dragged by double teams to places of shelter.

But with all the confusing sights and sounds that turned New York upside down and made people wonder if it was not all a dream, the most appalling thing was the absolute breaking off of all outside communication. The elevated railway trains had partially resumed work, and citizens could go up and down town again without danger of freezing to death in the streets, but no one could get in or out of the city.

Locked in Sleeping Cars

All the sleeping cars in the public railway depots were given to the public as hotels. Women and children lay on the hard floors and thankfully ate cheese and crackers distributed by railway officials.

The telegraph wires were simply raveled up into tangled webs that caught the feet of horses and human beings in the snow. Editors cabled to London in hopes of getting news from Boston. The telegraph operators slept all night beside their instruments, but no sound broke the deadly silence.

Heroes of the Hour

The police and the firemen deserve the highest praise for the endurance, unselfishness and heroism which they have shown. A great, tender, noble heart has the American metropolis exhibited. Everyone agreed yesterday that every charitable and benevolent organization within the reach of New York must open its doors wide now if ever it is to be done. The city had lost so many millions of dollars by this storm that no man will dare to even guess at the total damage.

_{CREDITS: Clifford H. Jordan/Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images; The Granger Collection; Bettmann/Getty Images.}