hat similar alarms
had previously proved ill-founded. There is no question that ample
warning was given and that all the people in the valley could have
escaped had they acted promptly.

When the center of the dam yielded at three o'clock, it did so in a
break of 300 feet wide. Trees and rocks were hurled high in the air,
and the vast, boiling flood rushed down the ravine like an arrow from
a bow. It took one hour to empty the reservoir. In less than five
minutes the flood reached South Fork, and thence, changing the
direction of its rush, swept through the valley of the Conemaugh. With
the procession of the deluge, trees, logs, debris of buildings, rocks,
railroad iron, and the indescribable mass of drift were more and more
compacted for battering power; and what the advance bore of the flood
spared, the mass in the rear, made up of countless battering rams,
destroyed.

The distance from Conemaugh lake to Johnstown, something over,
eighteen miles, was traversed in about seven minutes; and here the
loss of life and the damage to property was simply appalling.
Survivors who passed through the experience safely declare its horrors
to have been far beyond the power of words to narrate. After the most
thorough possible

CHAPTER XXXIV.

ST. PIERRE, MARTINIQUE, ANNIHILATED BY A VOLCANO.

BY TRUMBULL WHITE.

=Fifty Thousand Men, Women and Children Slain in an
Instant--The Island Capital Obliterated--Molten Fire and
Suffocating Gases Rob Multitudes of Life--Death Reigns in the
Streets of the Stricken City--The Governor and Foreign Consuls
Die at their Posts of Duty--Burst of Flame from Mount Pelee
Completes the Ruin--No Escape for the Hapless Residents in the
Fated Town--Scenes of Suffering Described--St. Pierre the
Pompeii of Today--Desolation over All--Few Left to Tell the
Tale of the Morning of Disaster.=

Behold a peaceful city in the Caribbean sea, beautiful with the
luxuriant vegetation of a tropic isle, happy as the carefree dwellers
in such a spot may well be, at ease with the comforts of climate and
the natural products which make severe labor unnecessary in these
sea-girt colonies. Rising from the water front to the hillsides that
lead back toward the slopes of Mount Pelee, St. Pierre, metropolis of
the French island of Martinique, sits in picturesque languor, the blue
waves of the Caribbean murmuring on the beaches, the verdure-clad
ridges of the mountain range f