on Monday.

Wrecks of Five Iron Bridges.

The shrieks ceased early in the morning. Men had began to search the
ruins and had taken out the few that still lived. The fire engines began
to play on the still smouldering fire. Other workmen began to remove the
bodies. The fire had swept over the whole mass from shore to shore and
burned it to the water. A great field of crushed and charred timbers was
all that was left. The flood had gorged this in so tightly that it made
a solid bridge above the water. A tremendous, irresistible force had
ground and churned and macerated the debris until it was a confused,
solid, almost welded, conglomerate, stretching from shore to shore,
jammed high up against the stone bridge and extending up the river a
quarter of a mile, perhaps half as wide. In this tangled heap and crush
of matter were the twisted wrecks of five iron bridges, smashed
locomotives, splintered dwellings and all their contents; human beings
and domestic animals, hay and factory machinery; the rich contents of
stores and brick walls ground to powder--all the products of human
industry, all the elements of human interests, twisted, turned, broken
in a mighty mill and all thrown together.

A Sickening Spectacle.

I walked over this extraordinary mass this morning and saw the fragments
of thousands of articles. In one place the roofs of forty frame houses
were packed in together just as you would place forty bended cards one
on top of another. The iron rods of a bridge were twisted into a perfect
spiral six times around one of the girders. Just beneath it was a
woman's trunk, broken up and half filled with sand, with silk dresses
and a veil streaming out of it. From under the trunk men were lifting
the body of its owner, perhaps, so burned, so horribly mutilated, so
torn from limb to limb, that even the workmen, who have seen so many of
these frightful sights that they have begun to get used to them, turned
away sick at heart.

I saw in one place a wrecked grocery store--bins of coffee and tea,
flour, spices and nuts, parts of the counter and safe mingled together.
Near it was the pantry of the house, still partly intact, the plates and
saucers regularly piled up, a waiter and a teapot, but not a sign of the
woodwork, not a recognizable outline of a house. In another place a
halter, with a part of a horse's head tied to a bit of a manger, and a
mass of hay and straw about, but no other signs of the stable in which