towns counted their losses by hundreds.

“Ten thousand dead,” was the announcement that came over the wires.

The effect can never be told. Centuries may come and go, but no century can make its mark in the history of time like that of the Nineteenth, with its aide, the Conemaugh.

MIDST FIRE AND FLOOD.

Hundreds upon hundreds of lives were lost. The number cannot even be approximated, for in such regions there are always innumerable people—what the careless world calls its floating population—who would not be missed or accounted for until the Judgment roll is called.

Even on Monday, three days after the horror, mothers meandered about frantically begging that their children might be returned to them, and men with hearts brushed tears from their eyes and endeavored to make them believe that their dear ones had been rescued. Children pleadingly prayed that they might be saved, but the cruel, ever onward-rushing flood gathered them in and swept them onward.

To add to the horror the Johnstown Bridge, as if to add terror to terror and to make confusion worse confounded, swept from its approaches and precipitated the horror-stricken multitude into the torrent. An overturned stove in a dwelling inaugurated a conflagration. Nearly a hundred people were literally burned to death, thus adding holocaust to the far more preferable death by drowning.

Scarcely had the news of the terrible disaster been sent abroad than the alert newspapers had their commissioners speedily on their way to the scene.

Only the most meagre accounts had been given to the public for the reason that every mode of communication via telegraph or train had been cut off.

When the newspaper representatives reached Johnstown the scene was a pitiable one. The former town was a swamp. Debris was piled here, there and everywhere, and the pestilential stench from the dead bodies was next to unbearable.

The scene beggars description.

Even the trained newspaper men turned their eyes aside and held their nostrils. Corpses everywhere. Dank corpses at that, with glazed, fishy eyes and sloppy wet hair, that made the onlooker feel aweary, and not over anxious to handle.

In a single hole, after the waters had passed by, one hundred and fifty bodies were found. Just imagine it! Two hours before these one hundred and fifty souls were alive, but there they were, huddled together as if they had been congregated for the purpose which had asserted itself.

East Conemaugh was almost depopulated, and Franklinborough, on the north of Johnstown, was entirely swept away. Mineral Point, between Johnstown and the viaduct, was blotted out of existence. If any of the six hundred souls that formerly resided there are alive, the reporters could not find them. Ninevah, just below the Conemaugh furnace, is a city of corpses. Indeed, from South Fork to Bolivar and for a distance of a dozen miles or so the banks of the old-time river are literally strewn with corpses.

After the death-dealing current had gone on the work of tallying began. It will never be ended.

Then the fiends in human shape began their ghoulish work of robbing the dead. Summary punishment was dealt out to some of them. A vigilance committee, hastily organized, ran a score of them into the river, and that was the end of them.

At five o’clock on Monday evening hundreds upon hundreds of citizens are arriving upon the scene. Coffins are coming in by the carload, and the result of philanthropic and necessary aid began to pour in.

More relief is needed.

The best story of the horror can be gathered from the tale of an eye-witness, C. W. Linthicum. Said he:

“My train left Pittsburgh Friday morning for Johnstown. The train was due at Sang Hollow at 4.02, but was five minutes late.

“At Sang Hollow, just as we were about to pull out, we heard that the flood was coming. Looking ahead up the valley, we saw an immense wall of water thirty feet high raging, roaring, rushing toward us.

“The engineer reversed his engine and rushed back to the hills at full speed, and we barely escaped the waters. We ran back three hundred yards and the flood swept by, tearing up tracks, telegraph poles, houses and trees.

A STEAM HORSE WRECKED.

“Superintendent Pitcairn was on the train. We all got out and tried to save the floating people. Taking the bell-cord, we formed a line and threw the rope out, thus saving seven persons.

“We could have saved more, but many were afraid to let go the debris. It was an awful sight. The immense volume of water was roaring along, whirling over huge rocks, dashing against the banks and leaping high in the air, and this seething flood was strewn with timber, trunks of trees, parts of houses, and hundreds of human beings, cattle and almost every animal.

“The fearful peril of the living was not more awful than the horror of hundreds of distorted, bleeding corpses whirling along the avalanche of death.

“We counted 107 people floating by and dead without number. A section of roof came by, on one of which were sitting a woman and a girl.”

Other tales by eye-witnesses confirm the fact that the horror has never been excelled by anything of its kind in history.

Indeed, it will never perhaps be known what the real extent of the awful calamity is.

Johnstown, with its former population of ten thousand or thereabouts, was almost entirely swept away when the awful floods came, and many of the villages between that point and Nineveh are things of the past so far as life is concerned. Indeed the whole valley is a veritable Valley of the Shadow of Death.

So great was the crush of the wreckage, debris and dead bodies, at some points along the valley that dynamite had to be used, thus adding to the horror of the scene.

Nineveh is twenty-three miles below Johnstown, yet a large number of the bodies found at Nineveh were those of former residents of Johnstown, who had been swept that great distance down the valley to their death.

There are incidents where bodies were carried a hundred miles and there deposited.

A relation of some of the real facts, circumstances and scenes and incidents of the terrible disaster would be considered Munchausenish by the majority of our readers, but some of them were miraculous. Here is one. S. H. Klein, a New Yorker, had a queer experience. He was at the Merchants’ Hotel and he worked like a beaver during the trying times of Friday night and Saturday morning, aiding in the rescue of no less than sixty persons from the floating debris. Among these were the Rev. Mr. Phillips, his wife and two children. Mr. Phillips is a stalwart man and when the flood struck his house he fled to the roof with his family. Presently the house floated and the sturdy dominie placed his wife and two children on a table. Then he got under the table, and, letting it rest with its precious burden on his head, arose to his feet. As the house floated down on the tide it grazed the hotel building, and Mr. Klein and others assisted in hauling the imperilled parson and his family into an upper window of the hotel.

Here are other incidents: The story of the mishap to the day express train at Conemaugh bridge is developing slowly through the efforts of the railway authorities to obtain definite information. Of the 300 passengers on the train, all but eight seem to be accounted for, and it is believed that these eight are lost. They are Bessie Bryan, daughter