Work was begun in dead earnest on Wednesday on the Cambria Iron Works buildings. The Cambria people gave out the absurd statement that their loss will not exceed $100,000. It will certainly take this amount to clean the works of the debris, to say nothing of repairing them. The buildings are nearly a score in number, some of them of enormous size, and they extend along the Conemaugh River for half a mile, over a quarter of a mile in width. Their lonely chimneys, stretching high out of the slate roofs above the brick walls, make them look not unlike a man-of-war of tremendous size. The buildings on the western end of the row are not damaged a great deal, though the torrent rolled through them, turning the machinery topsy-turvy; but the buildings on the eastern end, which received the full force of the flood, fared badly. The eastern ends are utterly gone, the roofs bent over and smashed in, the chimneys flattened, the walls cracked and broken, and, in some cases, smashed entirely. Most of the buildings are filled with drift. The workmen, who have clambered over the piles of logs and heavy drift washed in front of the buildings and inside, say that they do not believe that the machinery in the mills is damaged very much, and that the main loss will fall on the mills themselves. Half a million may cover the loss of the Cambria people, but this is a rather low estimate. They have nine hundred men at work getting things in shape, and the manner in which they have had to go to work illustrates the force with which the flood acted. The trees jammed in and before the buildings were so big and so solidly wedged in their places that no force of men could pull them out, and temporary railroad tracks were built up to the mass of debris. Then one of the engines backed down from the Pennsylvania Railroad yards, and the workmen, by persistent effort, managed to get big chains around parts of the drift. These chains were attached to the engine, which rolled off puffing mightily, and in this way the mass of drift was pulled apart. Then the laborers gathered up the loosened material, heaped it in piles a distance from the buildings, and burned them. Sometimes two engines had to be attached to some of the trees to pull them out, and there are many trees which cannot be extricated in this manner. They will have to be sawed into parts, and these parts lugged away by the engines. [Illustration: 250,000,000 FEET OF LOGS AFLOAT IN THE SUSQUEHANNA.] CHAPTER XXVII. Upon a pretty little plateau two hundred feet above the waters of Stony Creek, and directly in front of a slender foot-bridge which leads into Kernsville, stands a group of tents which represents the first effort of any national organization to give material sanitary aid to the unhappy survivors of Johnstown.