and in a few minutes forty-seven
city blocks were leveled to the ground. The fairest and best built part
of the city could no more withstand this awful force than the weakest
hovels. Twelve hundred buildings were destroyed, most of them homes, but
among them many churches and school houses. The just and the unjust
fared alike in this riot of destruction and then the tornado rushed on
to find other objects on which to wreck its force in Council Bluffs and
elsewhere. It left in its wake many fires, but fortunately also a heavy
rain, while later a deep fall of snow covered up the scene of its awful
destruction.

THE TERROR OF THE FLOOD

With the rest of the country, fair Dayton sorrowed for Omaha. Two days
later Omaha, bowed and almost broken by her own misfortune, looked with
sympathy across to Dayton, whose woe was even greater. A thousand
communities in the United States read the story and in their own sense
of security sent eager proffers of assistance to the striken districts.
And not one of them has assurance that it may not be next. There is no
sure definition of the course of the earthquake, the path of the wind,
the time and place of the storm-cloud. Science has its limitations. Only
the Infinite is master of these forces.

In the legal parlance of the practice of torts such occurrences as these
are known as "acts of God." Theologians who attempt to solve the
mysteries of Providence have found in such occasions the evidence of
Divine wrath and warning to the smitten people. But to seek the reason
and to know the purpose, if there be purpose in it, is not necessary.
The fact is enough. It challenges, staggers, calls a halt, compels men
and women to think--and even to pray.

But the flood did not confine itself to Dayton. It laid its watery hand
of death and destruction over a whole tier of states from the Great
Lakes to New England, and over the vast area to the southward which is
veined by the Ohio River and its tributaries, and extending from the
Mississippi Valley almost to the Atlantic seaboard. And as this awful
deluge drained from the land into Nature's watercourses the demons of
death and devastation danced attendance on its mad rush that laid waste
the borderlands of the Mississippi River from Illinois to the Gulf of
Mexico.

A VIVID PICTURE OF THE FLOOD

Those who have never seen a great flood do not know the meaning of the
Scriptural phrase, "the abomination of desolation."

An explosion, a