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J. Fearon, Principal [top left corner]
School for the Deaf [Centred on the top of the page]
Halifax, N. S.

I have delayed writing partly because we have been and still are in a frightful state of chaos, and in a measure, because I wish to think as little as possible of the awful catastrophe ['s' written in after a misspelling] that has overtaken us -- the worst of its kind that the world has ever seen.

Thursday morning, December 6th, will never be forgotten in Halifax. It was one of those days that we sometimes have here reminding one more of departing summer than the beginning of an arctic winter. Everything seemed calm and peaceful, and the sun shone brightly from a cloudless sky. I had just left Eileen and Mary who had gone with their teacher Miss Carver to the little schoolroom, which was formerly my den or smoking room, and I was on my way to the office along the main hall, whenlike a bolt from the blue and with a roar and a creek as if hell had been let loose thousands of tons of the most powerful and deadly munitions of war known to science exploded in the Harbour. The Belgian relief ship "Imo" had collided with the munition ship"Mont Blanc". The science was incredible. Ours is comparatively a very[crossed out with a line] large building being about three hundred feet along, four stories high and situated on the top of a hill overlooking the Harbour where it [illegible strike through] received the full shock of the explosion. It has between three and four hundred large windows, and not a piece of glass as large as your hand was left intact. Doors were torn from their hinges and pitched to the other side of the room; windows were wrenched from their frames and smashed to atoms, the floors being literally covered an inch deep with fragments of glass and broken plaster dashed from wall and ceilings. The huge pine beams supporting the roof were split and cracked like matches and the pitched part of