Fully three thousand people were gathered, weary, wet, cold, haggard, hungry, homeless, shoeless, hatless, coatless, ragged, muddy, many almost naked, gazing in mute despair, in awful anguish that could shed no tear (for no tears were shed) upon miles of wreck, containing by the thousand the dead bodies of husbands, wives, parents, children, lovers, and precious friends. Could humanity be called to suffer more? Mr. Horace W. Rose, Esq., a prominent attorney about fifty years of age, had spent his life in Johnstown, and remembered distinctly all the great floods it had experienced. The highest he had seen was in 1887, and he had little fear that ever he would see another higher. He was not alarmed when the water entered the lower story of his dwelling, but as he saw it advance above the wash board, and with its foul freight stain the beautiful paper recently put upon the wall, he was not without a feeling of sadness. He conversed pleasantly with his neighbors, and twitted their children with invitations to come across the way and make a friendly visit. Fifteen minutes before the catastrophe he was engaged in shooting rats, and continued the occupation until hearing a loud crash, he ran to the back part of his house, and saw that the water had broken down his carriage-house and was driving the carriage into the yard. At the same moment he heard cries, the alarm of a bell, and the loud screams of a steam whistle. Feeling that something awful must have happened, he ran to the third floor, followed by all his family, and looking out through a window, which permitted a view of nearly a mile up the Conemaugh, the awful fact was at once apparent. “I saw stretching from hill to hill, a great mass of timber, trees, roofs and debris of every sort, rapidly advancing, wrecking and carrying everything before it. It was then about the midst of what was known as the Gautier Works, a department of the Cambria Iron Works, which covered perhaps ten or eleven acres of ground. A dense cloud hung over the line of the rolling debris, which I then supposed was the steam and soot which had arisen from hundreds of fires in the Gautier Works as the waves rolled over them. I stood and looked as the resistless tide moved on, and saw brick buildings crushed in an instant pass out of sight, while frame tenements were quickly crushed to atoms. “Members of my family asked me if there was no escape. I answered, ‘No; this means death to us all.’ My wife with blanched face said, ‘Won’t our big strong house stand?’ I replied deliberately: ‘No, Maggie; no building can stand this awful jam, and we are all lost.’