nutterable
grief into countless happy homes.

Lying in a narrow valley were eight villages, aggregating 50,000 to
80,000 inhabitants, the largest of the eight being situated at the lower
end, with about 25,000 inhabitants.

Far up in the mountain, 300 feet above the chief village of the valley,
hung a huge body of water. As nature had designed it, this had been a
small lake with natural outlets, which prevented it from being a menace
to the valley below. But the hand of man sought to improve the work of
nature. An immense dam, 110 feet in height, held back the water till the
lake was more than quadrupled in size.

THE SWOLLEN WATERS

These were the conditions on May 31, 1889. There had been heavy rains
for several days. The artificially enlarged lake was really a receiving
reservoir of the water-shed of the Alleghany Mountains. Every little
stream running into it was swollen to a torrent. The lake, which in
ordinary times was three and a half miles long, with an average width of
over a mile, and a depth in some portions of 100 feet, was swollen into
a volume of water of enormous proportions. Between it and the valley
below there was a dam nearly 1,000 feet wide, 100 feet high, ninety feet
thick at the base and twenty at the top. This barrier gave way and the
water rushed into the valley in a solid wave with a perpendicular front
of forty feet.

It swept away the seven smaller villages like straw, hurled them,
together with uncounted thousands of their inhabitants, upon the larger
village, and then, with the accumulated ruin of the whole eight, dashed
upon the stone bridge at the bottom of the valley. The bridge withstood
the shock, and a new dam, as fateful with horror as the first had been,
was formed. It held back the water so that the whole valley was a lake
from twenty to forty feet in depth, with the remains of its villages
beneath its surface. The wreckage of the ruined villages, piled from
forty to sixty feet high, against the bridge, spread over a vast area,
with countless bodies of the living and the dead crushed within it and
struggling for life upon it, caught fire, and burned to the water's
edge.

When the flood came--a terrific punishment for the carelessness of the
past--the doubters saw their homes washed away, their dear ones
drowned; in some cases they did not even live to see the extent of the
havoc wrought. Whole families were drowned like rats; houses were
shattered to pieces or floated abo