fins of the
cheaper sort. They come from different cities within two or three
hundred miles of Johnstown, and after being stacked up they are pulled
out as needed. Coffins are to be seen everywhere about the valley, ready
for use when a body is found. A trio of bodies was found near the
Hurlburt House under peculiar circumstances. They were hidden beneath a
pile of wreckage at least twenty-five feet in height. They were a
father, a mother and son. Around the waist of each a quarter inch rope
was tied so that the three were bound together tightly. The hands of the
boy were clasped by those of the mother, and the father's arms were
extended as if to ward off danger. The father probably knotted the rope
during the awful moments of suspense intervening between the coming of
the flood and the final destruction of the house they occupied. The
united strength of the three could not resist the mighty force of the
inundation, and like so many straws they were swept on the boiling surge
until life was crushed out.

Child and Doll in One Coffin.

I beheld a touching spectacle when the corpse of a little girl was
extricated and placed on a stretcher for transportation to the morgue.
Clasped to her breast by her two waxen hands was a rag doll. It was a
cheap affair, evidently of domestic manufacture. To the child of poverty
the rag baby was a favorite toy. The little mother held fast to her
treasure and met her end without separating from it. The two, child and
doll, were not parted when the white coffin received them, and they will
moulder together.

I saw an old-fashioned cupboard dug out of a pile of rubbish. The top
shelf contained a quantity of jelly of domestic manufacture. Not a
glass jar was broken. Indeed there have been some remarkable instances
of the escape of fragile articles from destruction. In the debris near
the railroad bridge you may come upon all manner of things. The
water-tanks of three locomotives which were borne from the roundhouse at
Conemaugh, two miles away, are conspicuous. Amid the general wreck,
beneath one of these heavy iron tanks, a looking glass, two feet by one
foot in dimensions, was discovered intact, without even a scratch on the
quicksilver.

Johnstown people surviving the destruction appear to bewail the death of
the Fisher family. "Squire" Fisher was one of the old time public
functionaries of the borough. He and his six children were swept away.
One of the Fisher girls was at home un