The story of how Mrs. Isidor Straus, wife of the New York merchant, met death with her husband on the Titanic rather than be separated from him, was rendered complete when Miss Ellen Bird, maid to Mrs. Straus, told how the self-sacrifice of Mrs. Straus made it possible for her to escape a watery grave.

  Miss Bird also supplied details of the appealing scenes between Mrs. Straus and her husband when the elderly though heroic woman brushed aside three opportunities to be saved, declaring to solicitous passengers that death in her husband's arms was more to be desired than life without him.

  Miss Bird's narrative was repeated by Sylvester Byrnes, general manager of R.H. Macy & Co. He said:

  "When the Titanic struck the iceberg Mr. and Mrs. Straus were walking arm in arm on the upperdeck. Although assured by the officers that there was no immediate cause for alarm, Mrs. Straus, with her husband, hurried to the stateroom of her maid, cautioning Miss Bird to dress hurriedly and as comfortably as she could, because the passengers might have to take to the lifeboats. Then Mr. and Mrs. Straus returned to the deck, where, shortly after, they were joined by Miss Bird.

  "Mr. Straus stepped aside when the first boat was being filled, explaining that he could not go until all the women and children had been given places. 'Where you are, Papa, I shall be,' spoke up Mrs. Straus, rejecting all entreaties to enter the boat.

  "Mr. Straus vainly attempted to persuade his wife to enter the to be a light. We all tried to get to the light, but after an hour or so found that it was simply some light reflection from the tip of an iceberg.

  "Just before leaving the steamer I saw Col. Astor. He was with his wife, and was insisting that she get into a lifeboat that was being filled. She seemed to resist, and Mr. Astor picked her up and put her in a seat. He was smiling all the time. There was some difficulty in the next boat, and Col. Astor was laughing as he helped several women into the boat.

ALL THE MEN ACTED CALMLY AND CHEERFULLY.

  "All the men among the passengers, so far as I could see, acted calmly, cheerfully, masterfully. Among the stokers and others who were sent to man the lifeboats there were many cowards."

  Mrs. Emily Richards, who with her mother and her two children was on the Titanic, journeying from Penzance, Cornwall, to join her husband in Akron, O., said:

  "I had put the children in bed and had gone to bed myself. We had been making good time all day, the ship rushing through the sea at a tremendous rate, and the air on deck was cold and crisp. I didn't hear the collision, for I was asleep. But my mother came and shook me.

  "'There is surely danger,' said mamma. 'Something has gone wrong.'

  "So we put on our slippers and outside coats and got the children into theirs and went on deck. We had on our night gowns under our coats. As we went up the stairway some one was shouting down in a calm voice: 'Everybody put on their life preservers before coming on deck!'

  "We went back and put them on, assuring each other that it was nothing. When we got on deck we were told to pass through the dining room to a ladder that was placed against the side of the cabins and led to the upper deck.

  "We were put through the portholes into the boats, and the boat I was in had a foot of water in it. As soon as we were in we were told to sit down on the bottom. In that position we were so low that we could not see out over the gunwale.

  "Once the boat had started away some of the women stood up, and the seamen, with their hands full with the oars, simply put their feet on them and forced them back into the sitting position.

  "We had not got far away by the time the ship went down, and after that there were men floating in the water all around, and Seven of them were picked up by us in the hours that followed between that and daybreak.

MAD WITH EXPOSURE.

  "Some of these seven were already mad with exposure, and babbled gibberish, and kept trying to get up and overturn the boat. The other men had to sit upon them to hold them down.

  "Two of the men picked up were so overcome with the cold of the water that they died before we reached the Carpathia, and their dead bodies were taken aboard. One woman, who spoke a tongue none of us could understand, was picked up by the boat and believed that her children were lost.

  "She was entirely mad. When her children were brought to her on the Carpathia she was wild with joy, and lay down on the children on the floor, trying to cover them with her body, like a wild beast protecting its young, and they had to take her children away from her for the time to save them from being suffocated."

  Miss Caroline Bonnell, of Youngstown, O., one of the survivors, said that passengers who got into lifeboats were led to believe that a steamship was near and that the lives of all would be saved.

  Miss Bonnell and her aunt, Miss Lily Bonnell, of London, England, were traveling with George D. Wick, an iron and steel manufacturer of Youngstown, his wife and daughter, Mary Natalie Wick. The women were saved. Mr. Wick went down with the ship. Like hundreds of others, he stood aside to give the women and children first chance.

  "Miss Wick and I occupied a stateroom together," said Miss Bonnell. "We were awakened shortly before midnight by a sudden shock, a grinding concussion. Miss Wick arose and looked out of the stateroom window. She saw some men playfully throwing particles of ice at one another, and realized that we had struck an iceberg.

  "She and I dressed, not hastily, for we were not greatly alarmed, and went on deck.

  "There we found a number of passengers. Naturally they were all somewhat nervous but there was nothing approaching a panic. The other members of our party also had come on deck, and we formed a little group by ourselves.

HAD NO IDEA THE SHIP WAS SINKING.

  "We were told to put on life belts, and obeyed. Then the sailors began to launch the lifeboats. Still we were not alarmed. We had no doubt that all on board would be saved. In fact, we had no idea that the ship was sinking and believed that the resort to the lifeboats was merely a precaution.

  "Mr. Wick kissed his wife good-by, and our boat, the first on that side of the ship, was lowered to the sea. There were about twenty-five women in the boat, with two sailors and a steward to row. These were the only men. The boat would have held many more.

  "As the boat was being loaded the officer in charge pointed out a light that glowed dimly in the distance on the surface of the sea and directed our sailors to row to that, land their passengers and return to the Titanic for more.

  "As we were rowed away we saw that the great liner was settling. We kept our boat pointed toward the light to which we were to row. As a matter of fact, there were two lights — one red and the other white. Sailormen on the Carpathia told us subsequently that the lights might have been those of a fishing boat caught in the ice and drifting with it — but who can tell?

  "After a while our sailors ceased rowing, saying it was of no use to keep on. Then we women tried to row, with the double light our objective. We rowed and rowed, but did not seem to gain on the light, which, like a will-o'-the-wisp, seemed ever to evade us. Finally we gave up and sat huddled in the lifeboat.

  "Some of the women complained of the cold, but the members of our own party did not suffer, being provided with plenty of wraps.

  "From the distance of a mile or more we heard the explosion and saw the Titanic go down. The lights did not go out all at once. As the ship slowly settled the rows of lights, one after another, winked out, disappearing beneath the surface. Finally the ship plunged down, bow first, and the stern slipped beneath the waves.

HAD HOPED ALL ON BOARD WOULD BE SAVED.

  "Even then we had hoped that all on board might be saved. It was only after we had been taken aboard the Carpathia, and somehow few of us there were compared with the great company aboard the Titanic, that we got the first glimmer of the appalling reality."

  "I never dreamed that it was serious," said Alfred White, one of the two oilers from the engine room who were saved by being picked up.

  "I was on the whale deck in the bow calling the watch that was to relieve me when the ice first came aboard. It was a black berg that we struck — that is, it was composed of black ice. It could not be seen at all at night.

  "The striking opened seams below the water line, but did not even scratch the paint above the line. I know that because I was one of those who helped make an examination over the side with a lantern.

  "I went down into the light engine room, where my station was, at 12.40 o'clock. We even made coffee, showing that there wasn't much thought of danger. An hour later I was still working around the light engines. I heard the chief engineer tell one of his subordinates that No. 6 bulkhead had given away.

  "At that time things began to look bad, for the Titanic was far down by the bow. I was told to go up and see how things were going, and made my way up through the dummy funnel to the bridge deck.

  "By that time all the boats had left the ship and yet every one in the engine room was at his post. I was near the captain and heard him say: 'Well, boys, I guess it's every man for himself now.'

  "I slipped down some loose boat falls and dropped into the water. There was a boat not far away, which later picked me up. There were five firemen in her as a crew, forty- nine women and sixteen children. There was no officer.

"THE MILLIONAIRES BOAT."

  "During the six hours we were afloat we were near what we boys later called the millionaires' boat. That lifeboat had only sixteen passengers in her. When all were put aboard the Carpathia the six men who were the crew of that millionaires' boat each got £5. Those who had worked harder saving second-class passengers didn't get a cent."

  White then told of the way in which the children from the open boats were swung aboard the Carpathia in sacks, while the women were hoisted up in rope swings.

  "Near the boat in which I was," White went on, "were two collapsible boats which had failed to work and were not better than rafts. They had thirty-two men clinging to them who were later picked up by the lifeboats.

  "The other two collapsible boats which had about sixty persons in them deposited what women they carried in the regular lifeboats and went to the scene of the sinking.

  "From the water were picked up perhaps fifty of the crew who had floated off when she sank or else who had jumped before. The second officer was picked up, too, and took command of a boat.

  "Now, about the sinking itself. There was some sort of an explosion just about 2 o'clock, or shortly after I had gone overboard. It was not until this explosion, the nature of which I do not know, that the lights went out. They had been fed by steam from oil boilers.

  "The explosion caused a break in the ship just aft of the third funnel. The forward section went down bow first. The after part then seemed almost to right itself, and we thought she might keep afloat.

  "But it wasn't long before the propellers shot out of the water, and down she went. A steward who stood on the poop deck had the ship go down under him. He was picked up later, and his watch was found to have stopped at 2.20 A.M., so we knew that that was the time she foundered. There was no apparent suction when she foundered.

CONTINUALLY BUMPED INTO DEAD BODIES.

  While we were cruising about the place our oars continually bumped into dead bodies, wearing life belts. Some of the bodies were of the half-naked stokers. They were killed by the shock. We knew that the temperature of the water had been 28 degrees at 11 o'clock the same evening. While we were waiting for the boat to go down we heard some fifteen or twenty shots from the rail of the ship. We only surmised what they were."

  There was a fireman who told of a woman in the boat which he helped man who started up "Pull for the Shore" and "Nearer My God, to Thee" after his boat had left the wreck. This kept up all night until the Carpathia arrived. Laurence Beasley, a Cambridge University man, who was a second-cabin passenger on the Titanic, amplified his previous account while visiting the White Star offices. After describing events immediately following the collision with the iceberg and his departure in a lifeboat, Mr. Beasley is quoted as saying:

  "We drifted away easily as the oars were got out, and headed directly away from the ship. Our crew seemed to be mostly cooks in white jackets, two at an oar, with a stoker at the tiller, who had been elected captain. He told us he had been at sea twenty- six years and had never yet seen such a calm night on the Atlantic.

  "As we rowed away from the Titanic we looked back from time to time to watch her, and a more striking spectacle it was not possible for any one to see. In the distance she looked an enormous length, her great bulk outlined in black against the starry sky, every porthole and saloon blazing with light. It was impossible to think anything could be wrong with such a leviathan, were it not for that ominous tilt downward in the bows where the water was by now up to the lowest row of portholes.

SHIP'S END ONLY A QUESTION OF MINUTES.

  "About 2 A.M., as near as I can remember, we observed her settling very rapidly, with the bows and the bridge completely under water, and concluded it was now only a question of minutes before she went, and so it proved. She slowly tilted straight on end, with the stern vertically upward, and, as she did, the light in the cabins and saloons, which had not flickered for a moment since we left, died out, came on again for a single flash, and finally went out altogether. At the same time the machinery roared down through the vessel with a rattle and a groaning that could be heard for miles, the weirdest sound, surely, that could be heard in the middle of the ocean a thousand miles away from land.

  "But this was not quite the end. To our amazement, she remained in that upright position for a time which I estimate at five minutes; others in the boat say less, but it was certainly some minutes while we watched at least one hundred and fifty feet of the Titanic towering up above the level of the sea and looming black against the sky.

  "Then, with a quiet, slanting dive, she disappeared beneath the waters. And there was left to us the gently heaving sea, the boat filled to standing room with men and women in every conceivable condition of dress and undress; above, the perfect sky of brilliant stars, with not a cloud in the sky, all tempered with a bitter cold that made us all long to be one of the crew who toiled away with the oar," and kept themselves warm thereby — a curious, deadening, bitter cold unlike anything we had felt before.

  "And then, with all these, there fell on the car the most appalling noise that ever human ear listened to — the cries of hundreds of our fellow-beings struggling in the icy-cold water, crying for help with a cry that we knew could not be answered. We longed to return and pick up some of those swimming, but this would have meant swamping our boat and further loss of the lives of all of us. We tried to sing to keep the women from hearing the cries, and rowed hard to get away from the scene of the wreck.

  "We kept a lookout for lights, and several times it was shouted that steamers' lights were seen. Presently, now down on the horizon, we saw a light that slowly resolved itself into a double light, and we watched eagerly to see if the two would separate and so prove to be only two of our boats. To our joy they moved as one, and round we swung the boat and headed for her.

  "The steersman shouted: 'Now, boys, sing!' and for the first time the boat broke into song, 'Row for the Shore, Sailors,' and for the first time tears came to the eyes of us all as we realized that safety was at hand. Our rescuer showed up rapidly, and as she swung around we saw her cabins all alight, and knew she must be a large steamship. She was now motionless and we had to row to her. Just then day broke — a beautiful, quiet dawn. We were received with a welcome that was overwhelming in its warmth."