Beaver, Adjutant-General Hastings
has telegraphed the following:

"Good order prevailed throughout the city and vicinity last night.
Police arrangements are excellent. Not one arrest made. No need of
sending troops. The Mayor of Johnstown and the Sheriff of Cambria
county, with whom I am in constant communication, request that no troops
be sent. I concur in their judgment. There is a great outside clamor for
troops. Do not send tents. Have nine hundred here, which are sufficient.
I advise you to make a call on the general public for money and other
assistance.

"About two thousand bodies have been rescued and the work of embalming
and burying the dead is going on with regularity. There is plenty of
medical assistance. We have a bountiful supply of food and clothing
to-day, and the fullest telegraphic facilities are afforded and all
inquiries are promptly answered.

"Have you any instructions or inquiries? The most conservative estimates
here place the number of lives lost at fully 5,000. The prevailing
impression is that the loss will reach from 8,000 to 10,000. There are
many widows and orphans and a great many wounded--impossible to give an
estimate. Property destroyed will reach $25,000,000. The popular
estimate will reach $40,000,000 to $50,000,000.

"I will issue a proclamation to-night to the people of the country and
to all who sympathize with suffering to give aid to our deeply afflicted
people. Tell them to be of good cheer, that the sympathies of all our
people, irrespective of section, are with them, and wherever the news of
their calamity has been carried responses of sympathy and aid are coming
in. A single subscription from England just received is for $1,000."

Grand View Cemetery has three hundred buried in it. All met death in the
flood. They have thirty-five men digging graves. Seven hundred dead
bodies in the hospital on Bedford street, Conneaut. One hundred dead
bodies in the school-house hospital, Adam street, Conneaut. Three
hundred bodies found to-day in the sand banks along Stony Creek,
vicinity of the Baltimore and Ohio; 182 bodies at Nineveh.

[Illustration: ON A MISSION OF MERCY.]

CHAPTER VI.

Shadows of Despair.

Another graphic account of the fearful calamity is furnished by an
eye-witness: The dark disaster of the day with its attendant terrors
thrilled the world and drew two continents closer together in the bonds
of sympathy that bind humanity to man. The midnight ter