"When the ice first began to break up, Leroux could not help standing still for a few moments, and watching the rapidly advancing line of breakage, and then when he turned to run for it or rather skate for it, he was quite alone, and at some little distance behind the crowd of people who had first taken the alarm. Suddenly there was a wild, despairing cry ahead, and Leroux saw that the ice was breaking up in the narrow channel between the two islands. At this juncture many people undoubtedly lost their heads as they skated right into the broken ice and almost all of them at once disappeared. It was between the two islands that the greatest loss of life occurred, as of the forty-nine bodies subsequently recovered in different parts of the lake, twenty-four were found in close proximity to one another at this spot, and yet there was scarcely a head to be seen at the time of the accident above the broken ice, as the weight of the heavy slabs forced those who fell in between them under water almost immediately. Although he was only a boy of fifteen at this time, he had never missed a chance of falling through weak or rotten ice every winter since he first went to school, and these various experiences had no doubt given him a good deal of self-confidence. At any rate he felt neither frightened nor flurried by the somewhat alarming circumstances of the position in which he now found himself, but quickly made up his mind as to the best course to adopt to save his life. As the ice had already broken up both before and behind him, but was still solid immediately behind him he stopped short where he was, and lay down at full length on the longest piece of ice he could see which was free from widely open cracks. He had scarcely done so, when the wave of breakage which had commenced near the bridge passed him, all the great cracks with which the ice-sheet was seamed opening to such an extent that every separate slab became detached. Many of these slabs were first tilted a little into the air, as had happened when the ice first broke up near the bridge, but they immediately fell flat again into their places, so that the whole of the ice-sheet in the central part of the ornamental water seemed to be in one piece, though in reality the cracks which divided it into innumerable small slabs were now so wide that each piece was independent the one of the other, and most of them would not have been large enough to support the weight of a man standing near their edge, without heeling over and precipitating him into the water.