The crest of the dam stood four or five feet above the spill-way. Towards noon of the 31st, persons on the watch saw the water of the reservoir rising at the rate of a foot an hour. Meanwhile a rumor had spread that the dam was leaking, and this attracted other observers. Some declared that jets of water were leaping from the lower side to a distance of thirty feet. Somewhere about half-past two o’clock water began to run over the top. The structure was then evidently doomed; for, though riprapped with stone on both slopes, no rampart of earth could long withstand the abrasion of a torrent running over its crest, and down its lower face. A South Fork pastor reached the spot at ten minutes before three. A foot of water was then running over the dam. A few minutes later a break was made “large enough to admit the passage of a train of cars;” then presently the whole thing dissolved almost instantly, like a phantom. A breach was made four hundred and twenty-nine feet wide clean down to the bottom, and with the noise of seven thunders and a tread that shook the hills like a young earthquake, out rushed a mountain of water “tree-top high.” At such a sight the awed spectator could only gasp, “God have mercy on the people in the vale below.” Rushing onward a mile in three minutes, or as some have claimed, twice or thrice as fast, in an instant down went a mill, two houses and some barns, up went an iron bridge tossed like a thing of straw, and a moment later the flood was at South Fork. Two trains, a passenger and a freight, detained by a wash-out further up the road, were standing at the station. Warned by the awful roar, the passenger train sprang out just in time to save the lives of the people on board. The engineer of the freight, seeing it impossible to move with his heavy train, unhitched the locomotive, opened the throttle-valve, and with the fireman, flew for life. The seething mountain leaped on the train and dragged it away, regardless [Illustration: THE BROKEN DAM.] of two brakemen, who surrendered their lives. The village of South Fork, standing in the angle above the junction of two streams, and on high ground, was comparatively unharmed, though two lives and considerable property were destroyed.