"The trainmen of the Pennsylvania road thought to sleep in the cars, but were driven out, and forced to take refuge in the trees, from which they were subsequently rescued. The Beaver Dam mill was moved from its position as though it was being towed by some enormous steam tug. The river swept away everything that offered it any resistance. Saturday night was the most awful I ever experienced. The horrors of the flood were intensified by an inky darkness, through which the cries of women and children were ceaselessly heard. Boatmen labored all night to give relief, and hundreds were brought to the hotel for safety. "On Sunday the waters began to subside, and then the effects were more noticeable. All the provision stores were washed out completely, and one of the banks had its books, notes, and greenbacks destroyed. I saw rich men begging for bread for their children. They had money, but there was nothing to be bought. This lack of supplies is the greatest trouble that Williamsport has to contend with, and I really do not see how the people are to subsist. "Sunday afternoon Mr. C. H. Blaisdell, Mr. Cochrane, a lumberman and woodman, a driver, and myself started in a wagon for Canton, with letters and appeals for assistance. The roads were all washed away, and we had to go over the mountains. We had to cut our way through the forests at times, hold the wagon up against the sides of precipices, ford streams, and undergo a thousand hardships. After two days of travel that even now seems impossible, we got into Canton more dead than alive. The soles were completely gone from my boots, and I had on only my night-shirt, coat, and trousers, which I had saved from the flood. A relief corps was at once organized, and sent with provisions for the sufferers. But it had to take a roundabout way, and I do not know what will become of those poor people in the meantime." Mr. Richard P. Rothwell, the editor of the New York _Engineering and Mining Journal_, and Mr. Ernest Alexander Thomson, the two men who rowed down the Susquehanna River from Williamsport, Pa., to Sunbury, and brought the first news of the disaster by flood at Williamsport, came through to New York by the Reading road. The boat they made the trip in was a common flat-bottom rowboat, about thirteen feet long, fitted for one pair of oars. There were three men in the crew, and her sides were only about three inches above the water when they were aboard. The third was Mr. Aaron Niel, of Phoenixville, Pa. He is a trotting-horse owner. Mr. Thomson is a tall, athletic young man, a graduate of Harvard in '87. He would not acknowledge that the trip was very dangerous, but an idea of it can be had from the fact that they made the run of forty-five miles in four and one-half hours.