oration. The plant is said to be valued at $5,000,000.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER II.

Death and Desolation.

The terrible situation on the second day after the great disaster only
intensifies the horror. As information becomes more full and accurate,
it does not abate one tittle of the awful havoc. Rather it adds to it,
and gives a thousand-fold terror to the dreadful calamity.

Not only do the scenes which are described appear all the more dreadful,
as is natural, the nearer they are brought to the imagination, but it
seems only too probable that the final reckoning in loss of life and
material wealth will prove far more stupendous than has even yet been
supposed.

The very greatness of the destruction prevents the possibility of an
accurate estimate. Beneath the ghastly ruins of the once happy towns and
villages along the pathway of the deluge, who shall say how many victims
lie buried? Amid the rocks and woods that border the broad track of the
waters, who shall say how many lie bruised and mangled and
unrecognizable, wedged between boulders or massed amid debris and
rubbish, or hidden beneath the heaped-up deposits of earth, and whether
all of them shall ever be found and given the last touching rites?

Already the air of the little valley, which four days ago was smiling
with all the health of nature and the contentment of industrious man,
is waxing pestiferous with the awful odor of decaying human bodies.
Buzzards, invited by their disgusting instinct, gather for a promised
feast, and sit and glower on neighboring perches or else circle round
and round in the blue empyrean over the location of unfriended corpses,
known only to their keen sense of smell or vision.

But another kind of buzzard, more disgusting, more hideous, more vile,
has hastened to this scene of woe and anguish and desolation to exult
over it to his profit. Thugs and thieves in unclean hordes have
mysteriously turned up at Johnstown and its vicinity, as hyenas in the
desert seem to spring bodily out of the deadly sand whenever the corpse
of a gallant warrior, abandoned by his kind, lies putrefying in the
night.

There is a cry from the afflicted community for the policing of the
devastated region, and there is no doubt it is greatly needed. Happily,
Nemesis does not sleep this time in the face of such provocation as is
given her by these atrociously inhuman human beings. It is a
satisfaction to record that something more than a