"The tragic pen-pictures of the scenes in the press dispatches have not been exaggerated. They cannot be. The worse sight of all was to see the great fire at the railroad-bridge. It makes my blood fairly curdle to think of it. I could see the lurid flames shoot heavenward all night Friday, and at the same time hundreds of people were floating right toward them on top of houses, etc., and to meet a worse death than drowning. To look at a sight like this and not be able to render a particle of assistance seemed awful to bear. I had a narrow escape, truly. In my mind I can hear the shrieks of men, women, and children, the maniac's ravings, and the wild roar of a sea of water sweeping everything before it." [Illustration: VIEW ON CLINTON ST., JOHNSTOWN.] Among the lost was Miss Jennie Paulson, a passenger on a railroad train, whose fate is thus described by one of her comrades: "We had been making but slow progress all the day. Our train lay at Johnstown nearly the whole day of Friday. We then proceeded as far as Conemaugh, and had stopped from some cause or other, probably on account of the flood. Miss Paulson and a Miss Bryan were seated in front of me. Miss Paulson had on a plaid dress, with shirred waist of red cloth goods. Her companion was dressed in black. Both had lovely corsage bouquets of roses. I had heard that they had been attending a wedding before they left Pittsburg. The Pittsburg lady was reading a novel entitled _Miss Lou_. Miss Bryan was looking out of the window. When the alarm came we all sprang toward the door, leaving everything behind us. I had just reached the door when poor Miss Paulson and her friend, who were behind me, decided to return for their rubbers, which they did. I sprang from the car into a ditch next the hillside, in which the water was already a foot and a-half deep, and, with the others, climbed up the mountain side for our very lives. We had to do so, as the water glided up after us like a huge serpent. Any one ten feet behind us would have been lost beyond a doubt. I glanced back at the train when I had reached a place of safety, but the water already covered it, and the Pullman car in which the ladies were was already rolling down the valley in the grasp of the angry waters." Mr. William Scheerer, the teller of the State Banking Company, of Newark, N. J., was among the passengers on the ill-fated day express on the Pennsylvania Railroad that left Pittsburg at eight o'clock A. M., on the now historic Friday, bound for New York.