ily, and all the afternoon the middle of the
bridge sagged down into the water, but the people kept on struggling
across. Many of them carried coffins containing bodies from the Morgue.
There are no express wagons, no hearses--scarcely any vehicles of any
kind in the town--and all the coffins have to be carried on the
shoulders of the men.

Coffins are a dreadfully common sight. It is impossible to move a dozen
steps in any direction without meeting one or very likely a procession
of of them. One hundred of them were piled up in front of the Morgue
this morning. Twice as many more were on the platform of the
Pennsylvania station. Carloads of coffins were being unloaded from
freight cars below town and carried along the roads. Almost every house
has a coffin in it. Every boat that crosses the river carries one, and
rows of them stood by the bank to receive the bodies.

Merely a Mud Plain.

There is a narrow fringe of houses on each side of the empty plain,
which escaped because they were built on higher ground. Fine brick
blocks and paved streets filled the business part of the town, which was
about a mile long and half a mile wide. Where these blocks stood mud is
in some places six feet deep. Over and through it all is scattered an
extraordinary collection of rubbish--boilers, car wheels, fragments of
locomotives, household furniture, dead animals, clothing, sewing
machines, goods from stores, safes, passenger and street cars, some half
buried in the sand, some all exposed, helter-skelter.

It is simply impossible to realize the tremendous force exercised by the
flood, though the imagination is assisted by the presence of heavy iron
beams twisted and bent, railroad locomotives swept miles away, rails
torn up, the rocks and banks slashed away, and brick walls carried away,
leaving no traces of their foundations. The few stone houses that
resisted the shock were completely stripped of all their contents and
filled four feet deep with sand and powdered debris.

A Glimpse from a Window.

As I write this, seated within a curious circular affair, which was once
a mould for sewer pipe, are two operators busy with clicking
instruments. The floor is a foot deep with clay. There are no doors.
There are no windows which boast of glass or covering of any kind. The
lookout embraces the bulk of the devastated districts. Just below the
windows are the steep river banks, covered with a miscellaneous mass
thrown up by the flo