The whole world appeared to be topsy-turvy and
at the mercy of an angry and destroying demon of the elements. People
were floating about on housetops and in wagons, and hundreds were
clinging to tree-trunks, logs and furniture of every imaginable
description.

"My sister, Miss Nina, together with my step-brother and his wife, whom
she was visiting, drifted with the tide on the roof of a house a
distance of two blocks, where they were rescued. With a number of others
I built a raft and in a short time had pulled eleven persons from the
very jaws of death. Continuing, Mr. Speck related how a number of folks
from Woodvale had all come down upon their housetops. Mr. Curtis
Williams and his family picked their way from house to house, finally
being pulled in the Catholic church window by ropes."

Three of a Family Drowned.

William Hinchman, with his wife and two children, reached the stone
bridge in safety. Here one of the babies was swept away through the
arches. The others were also swept with the current, and when they came
out on the other side the remaining child was missing, while below Mrs.
Hinchman disappeared, leaving her husband the sole survivor of a family
of four.

"Did your folks all escape alive?" I asked of George W. Hamilton, late
assistant superintendent of the Cambria Iron Company, whom I met on the
road near New Florence.

"Oh, no" was his reply. "Out of a family of sixteen seven are lost. My
brother, his wife, two children, my sister, her husband and one child,
all are gone; that tells the tale. I escaped with my wife by jumping
from a second story window onto the moving debris. We landed back of the
Morrell Institute safe and sound."

Hairbreadth Escapes.

The stories of hairbreadth escapes and the annihilation of families
continue to be told. Here is one of them. J. Paul Kirchmann, a young
man, boarded with George Schroeder's family in the heart of the town,
and when the flood came the house toppled over and went rushing away in
the swirling current. There were seven in all in the party and Kirchmann
found himself wedged in between two houses, with his head under water.
He dived down, and when he again came to the surface succeeded in
getting on the roof of one of them. The others had preceded him there,
and the house floated to the cemetery, over a mile and a half away,
where all of them were rescued. Kirchmann, however, had fainted, and for
seven or eight hours was supposed to be dead.