Year: 1874

ahead of the food from Williamsburg
through Skinnerville to Haydenville.


Is it any wonder that all this ruin
should be Mecca of sight-seers day
after day2 SO men had come quietly
to look upon something great, some
thing worth seeing and worth telling of
for years. There were very few women,
except those of the valley, or friends
who had come to help lay out the dead,
and no ill-behavior, except among some
stray visitors who looked on while the
gangs were working to get out the dead
from some of the tangled, twisted,
stacked heaps of rubbish with which
the plain abounded. One of these
gangs Just below SINNERS was led by
the man who expected to find his wife
in the pile they were untwisting and
hewing through. Kin you identify
this, John ?" "Do you know this red
cloak, John ?" The man didn't talk
He shook his head and worked on.
Finally when they were nearing the
bottom of the heap, and bit of mud
stained white cloth with tatting sewed
upon it had been fshed out and dis
cussed and laid aside, up came strange
man into the crowd and by few in
quiries of bystanders put himself into
possession of the facts. Then he walked
up to "John :" Hain't found yer wife
yet, hev YEP" The man shook him off
as one shakes off fly, but without a
word, and by and by the curious
stranger went his way, leaving the man
who hadn't found his wife tossing off
timbers from the heap, dreading the
discovery he longed for because he
wculd at least give his wife's body a
funeral service before burial.


AS curiosity brought many of the
visitors, their visit, if inopportune, was
pardonable because of the grand and
awful sight there was to see-a desert
of water, of things strange and uncouth;
wroughtint shape like nothing on earth
"a apandemonium wherein the presiding
chance worked out the most bizarre
effects of grouping eye has looked on
outside the various landscapes along
the Yellowstone. Over the green of
the meadows is laid two feet of sand or
of gigantic gravel, every stone of which
is boulder. The plough of the tor
rent has scooped out strangely winding
gulches in the earth whose edges are
already eroded and worn smooth un-
der the water which was at once plow
and harrow. Groves of young trees are
bent to the ground and left flattened
with their limbs tangled in drift and
debris. Stronger trees, if they were in
the full swing of the current, are up
rooted or snapped off. If they were at
one side the flood has left with them
stacks of timber, of tree trunks, of iron
scraps, of clothes, of rocks, of earth.
Away up in tree-top oftentimes is a
shapeless something that was the wood
en- side of house or its tin roof, and
then down again in the track of the
flood are the broken houses, of which
you know by their dilapidation that the
life has been shaken out of them and
turned into death in the abyss of the
stream. And of all this seven miles,
from Williamsburg to Northampton it.
self, and to end it at Northampton a
railway embankment sapped and gut
tered and sucked away, bridge gone,
an immense factory roof lifted over an
embankment into q mud-covered and
rubbish laden fiat below, with washings
of seven miles of ruin all around, and
ninety minutes was enough to make
such chaos as this out of a New Eng
land paradise.