of Mr. Reade's
imagination, but actual occurrences. The novelist obtained facts and
incidents for one of the most striking chapters in all of his works
from the events which followed the breaking of the Dale Dyke embankment
at Sheffield, England, in March, 1864, when 238 lives were lost and
property valued at millions was destroyed.

It will need even more vivid and vigorous descriptive powers than Mr.
Reade possessed to adequately delineate the scene of destruction and
death now presented in Johnstown and the adjacent villages. The
Sheffield calamity, disastrous as it proved to be, was a small affair
when compared with this latest reservoir accident. The Mill River
reservoir disaster of May, 1874, with its 200 lives lost and $1,500,000
of property destroyed, almost sinks into insignificance beside it. The
only recorded calamity of the kind which anywhere approaches it occurred
in Estrecho de Rientes, in Spain, in April, 1802, when a dam burst and
drowned 600 persons and swept $7,000,000 worth of property away. But
above all these calamities in sad pre-eminence will stand the Conemaugh
disaster.

But dark as the picture is, it will doubtless be relieved by many acts
of heroism. The world will wait to learn if there was not present at
Conemaugh some Myron Day, whose ride on his bareback steed before the
advancing wall of water that burst from Mill River Dam in 1874, shouting
to the unsuspecting people as he rode: "The reservoir is breaking! The
flood is coming! Fly! Fly for your lives," was the one mitigating
circumstance in that scene of woe and destruction. When the full story
of the Conemaugh calamity is told it will, doubtless, be found that
there were many deeds of heroism performed, many noble sacrifices made
and many an act as brave as any performed on the field of battle.
Already we are told of husbands and mothers who preferred to share a
watery grave with their wives and children sooner than accept safety
alone.

Such a calamity, while it makes the heart sick with its story of death
and suffering, always serves to bring out the better and higher
qualities in men and women, and to illustrate how closely all mankind
are bound together by ties of sympathy and compassion. This fact will be
made evident now by the open-handed liberality which will quickly flow
in to relieve the suffering, and, as far as possible, to repair the loss
caused by this historic calamity.

CHAPTER V.

The Awful Work of Death.