rdinarily good time
nowadays. A passage in five hours is an exceptional one.

Engine 1309, the one that faced the flood below Conemaugh and stood
practically unharmed, backed down to the station as soon as the tracks
were laid up to where it stood and worked all right. Only the oil cups
and other small fittings, with the headlight, were broken.

The superintendent of the Woodvale Woolen Mills, one of the Cambria Iron
Company's concerns, was one of the very few fortunate ones in that
little place. He and all his family got into the flouring mill just
below the woolen mill and upon the roof. The woolen mill was totally
wrecked, though not carried away, and the flouring mill was badly
damaged, but the roof held and all were saved. These two parts of the
mill were the only buildings left standing in Woodvale.

A man in Kernville, on Friday last, had jet black hair, moustache and
beard. That night he had a battle with the waters. On Saturday morning
his hair and beard began to turn gray, and they are now well streaked
with white. He attributes the change to his awful Friday night's
experience.

Wounds of the Dead.

It is the impression of the medical corps and military surgeons who
arrived here early in the week that hundreds, maybe thousands of men,
women and children were insensible to all horror on that awful
afternoon, just a week ago, before the waters of the valley closed in
over them. Their opinion is based on the fact that hundreds and hundreds
of the bodies already brought to light are terribly wounded somewhere,
generally on the head. In many instances the wounds are sufficient in
themselves to have caused death.

The crashing of houses together in the first mad rush of the flood with
a force greater than the collision of railroad trains making fast time,
and the hurling of timbers, poles, towers and boulders through the air
is believed to have caused a legion of deaths in an instant, before the
lost knew what was coming. Even the survivors bear testimony to this.

Surgeon Foster, of the 14th Regiment, who was first to have charge of
the hospital, tells how he treated long lines of men, women and children
for wounds too terrible to mention and they themselves know not how it
happened only that they fell in a moment. In connection with his
experience he speaks of the tender, yet heroic, work of four Sisters of
Mercy, two from Pittsburgh and two here, who went ahead of him down the
ranks of the wounded with