fession.

THE JOHNSTOWN DISASTER.

The Conemaugh Valley, in the eastern part of Pennsylvania, is about
twenty miles in length. The city of Johnstown lies thirty-nine miles
west-southwest of Altoona and seventy-eight miles east-by-south of
Pittsburg. It is the seat of the Cambria Iron Works, which give
employment to fully 6,000 men, and is one of the leading industrial
establishments of the country. Conemaugh Lake is at the head of the
winding valley, eighteen miles away, and was the largest reservoir of
water in the world. It was a mile and a half wide at its broadest part,
and two miles and a half long. Most of the lake was a hundred feet deep.
The dam was a fifth of a mile wide, ninety feet thick at its base, and
one hundred and ten feet high. The mass of water thus held in restraint
was inconceivable.

The people living in the valley below had often reflected upon the
appalling consequences if this dam should give way. Few persons
comprehend the mighty strength of water, whose pressure depends mainly
upon its depth. A tiny stream, no thicker than a pipe-stem, can
penetrate deeply enough into a mountain to split it apart, and, should
the reservoir ever burst its bounds, it would spread death and
desolation over miles of country below.

There had been several alarms, but the engineers sent to make an
examination of the dam always reported it safe, and the people, like
those who live at the base of a volcano, came to believe that all the
danger existed in their imagination.

On the 31st of May, 1889, the dam suddenly gave way, sliding from its
base, like an oiled piece of machinery, and the vast mass of water shot
forward at the speed of more than two miles a minute. Seven minutes
after the bursting of the dam, the head of the resistless flood was
eighteen miles down the valley. A man on horseback had started, at a
dead-run, some minutes before the catastrophe, shouting a warning to the
inhabitants, some of whom, by instantly taking to flight up the
mountain side, were able to save themselves, but the majority waited too
long.

A FURIOUS TORRENT.

Imagination cannot picture the awful power of this prodigious torrent.
Trees were uptorn or flattened to the earth, houses, locomotives, and
massive machinery were tumbled over and over and bobbed about like so
many corks, and the flood struck Johnstown with the fury of a cyclone,
sweeping everything before it, as if it were so much chaff. Tearing
through the cit