s.
Imagination could not picture a situation more harrowing to human
feeling than to stand there and watch that horrible scene without being
able to rescue the prisoners or even alleviate their sufferings.

Ruins Left to Tell the Tale.

Just below the stone bridge are the great works of the Cambria Iron
Company. They occupy the eastern bank of the stream for a distance of
half a mile. The flood, tearing over the bridge, descended upon these
works and tore the southernmost end of them to pieces. The rest of the
buildings escaped, but none of the works were swept away in the torrent.
An iron bridge used jointly by the public and by the iron company to
transport its coal from the mines across the river was caught by the
very front of the flood and tossed away as if built of toothpicks.

Looking from the stone arch bridge, the iron company's buildings, the
lower town school house, three of the buildings which divided the flood,
a church, part of a brick residence and a little cluster of brick
business houses, is all that can be seen above the yellow waste. Why
these buildings are left it is impossible to say. The school house,
except for most of the windows being battered in and the scars and dents
driven into it from the passing wreckage, is almost uninjured, although
it stands directly in the centre of the flood.

Locomotives Swimming in the Torrent.

It is plain from the appearance of the buildings that the direction of
the flood in many places was rotary, and the houses which still stand
may have escaped between the eddies. No other explanation seems
possible, for the force of the torrent was tremendous. It carried five
locomotives, with their tenders, several miles, and piled them up
against the stone bridge as easily as it carried a box of clothespins.
At the head of the iron company's works was a great pile of iron in
pieces eight feet long and a foot and a half thick either way. The flood
toppled these over. In the half charred raft above the bridge are found
great boilers, masses of iron, twisted beams and girders from bridges,
heavy safes, pieces of railroad track, a hundred car wheels, mixed with
every conceivable object of household use--pianos, sofas, dressing
cases, crockery, trunks and their contents.

Yet in all that mass it is impossible to find any trace of that pile of
bricks built into the business houses of the town; nor yet upon the
banks, nor in the heaps of sand which, when the flood went d