"I put down my book and stepped out quickly to the rear platform, and was horrified at the sight that met my gaze up the valley. It seemed as if a forest was coming down upon us. There was a great wall of water roaring and grinding swiftly along, so thickly studded with the trees from along the mountain sides that it looked like a gigantic avalanche of trees. Of course I lingered but an instant, for the mortal danger we all were in flashed upon me at the first sight of that terrible on-coming torrent. But in that instant I saw an engine lifted bodily off the track and thrown over backward into the whirlpool, where it disappeared, and houses crushed and broken up in the flash of an eye. "The noise was like incessant thunder. I turned back into the car and shouted to the ladies, three of whom alone were in the car at the moment, to fly for their lives. I helped them out of the car on the side toward the hill, and urged them to jump across the ditch and run for their lives. Two of them did so, but the third, a rather heavy lady, a missionary, who was on her way to a foreign station, hesitated for an instant, doubtful if she could make the jump. That instant cost her her life. While I was holding out my hand to her and urging her to jump, the rush of waters came down and swept her, like a doll, down into the torrent. In the same instant an engine was thrown from the track into the ditch at my feet. The water was about my knees as I turned and scrambled up the hill, and when I looked back, ten seconds later, it was surging and grinding ten feet deep over the track I had just left. "The rush of waters lasted three-quarters of an hour, while we stood rapt and spell-bound in the rain, looking at the ruin no human agency could avert. The scene was beyond the power of language to describe. You would see a building standing in apparent security above the swollen banks of the river, the people rushing about the doors, some seeming to think that safety lay indoors, while others rushed toward higher ground, stumbling and falling in the muddy streets, and then the flood rolled over them, crushing in the house with a crash like thunder, and burying house and people out of sight entirely. That, of course, was the scene of only an instant, for our range of vision was only over a small portion of the city. "We sought shelter from the rain in the home of a farmer who lived high up on the side-hill, and the next morning walked down to Johnstown and viewed the ruins. It seemed as if the city was utterly destroyed. The water was deep over all the city and few people were visible. We returned to Conemaugh and were driven over the mountains to Ebensburg, where we took the train for Altoona, but finding we could get no further in that direction we turned back to Ebensburg, and from there went by wagon to Johnstown, where we found a train that took us to Pittsburg. I got home by the New York Central." CHAPTER X.