n or
brute, stone, wood or iron, to float down toward Pittsburgh or to sink
to the bottom, may be a few yards from where it was pushed off from the
main pile.

Up in the centre of the town the debris is piled even higher than at the
stone bridge, but the work is going on fairly well. The men seem to be
working more together and enter into the spirit of the thing. Besides
this, horses and wagons can get at the wrecks, and it really looks as if
this part of the ruins has been exaggerated, and some of the foremen
there say that at the present rate of work going on through the town all
the bodies that ever will be recovered will be found within the next ten
days. As to the condition these bodies are in, that has become almost a
matter of indifference, except as to the effect upon the health of the
living.

Compared with other Calamities.

An eye-witness writes as follows:

The scene is one that cannot be described in outline--it must be told in
detail to become intelligible. Never before in this country, at least,
was there a disaster so stupendous, so overwhelming, so terrible in its
fierce and unheralded onset and so sorrowful in its death-dealing work.
I traversed the Mill River Valley the day after the bursting of the Mill
River dam. I went over Wallingford, in Connecticut, a few hours after
that terrible cyclone had swept through the beautiful New England
village. I stood on the broken walls of the Brooklyn Theatre and looked
down upon hecatombs of dead sacrificed in that holocaust to Momus. Each
of these was in itself a terrible calamity, but here is not only what
was most terrible in all these, but every horrifying feature of the Mill
River flood, the Wallingford cyclone and the Brooklyn Theatre fire is
here magnified tenfold, nay, a hundred fold. And what is even more
terrible than the scenes of devastation, the piles of dead that have
been unearthed from the ruins and the mangled human bodies that still
remain buried in the debris, is the simple but startling fact that this
disaster ought not to have happened.

The flood was not due to the rains. This calamity is not the work of the
unprovoked fury of the angry elements. This fair town and the populous
valley above it, all the varied industries of this thriving city, all
these precious lives are a sacrifice to the selfishness of a few men
whose purses were bigger than their hearts. There would have been no
flood if these rich men had not built an artificial