gh to hold the heaviest
steamer. About fifty logs were chained together for further protection.
This arrangement for a time checked the mass of logs, but just when
everybody was thinking it would stop the output a small dam gave way,
bringing down with it another half million feet of lumber. When this
struck the temporary boom it parted, as if the huge cable was a piece of
thread, and the logs shot past.

Just at Bryants, however, a gorge formed shortly after two o'clock
Friday afternoon, and within a remarkably short time there was a pile of
logs wedged in that stretched back fully a quarter of a mile and the
top of which was more than ten feet high. This of course changed the
course of the stream a little, but the natural gorge had saved enough
logs to amount to more than $100,000 in money.

The following comments by one of our journals sum up the situation after
receiving the dreadful news of the three preceding days:

The Great Calamity.

The appalling catastrophy which has spread such awful havoc through the
teeming valley of the Conemaugh almost surpasses belief and fairly
staggers imagination. Without yet measuring its dire extent, enough is
known to rank it as the greatest calamity of the natural elements which
this country has ever witnessed. Nothing in our history short of the
deadly blight of battle has approached this frightful cataclysm, and no
battle, though destroying more life, has ever left such a ghastly trail
of horror and devastation. It seems more like one of those terrible
convulsions of nature from which we have hitherto been happily spared,
but which at rare intervals have swallowed up whole communities in
remote South American or oriental lands.

Ingenious and masterful as the human intellect is in guiding and
controlling the ordinary forces of nature, how impotent and
insignificant it appears in the presence of such a transcendent
disaster! It is well nigh inconceivable that a great section throbbing
with populous towns, and resonant with the hum of industry, should be
wiped out in the twinkling of an eye by a mighty, raging torrent, more
consuming than fire and more violent than the earthquake. The suddenness
of the blow and the impossibility of communicating with the scene add to
the terror of the event. The sickening spectacle of ruin and death which
will be revealed when the veil of darkness is lifted is left to
conjecture. The imagination can scarcely picture the dread realities,
a