18th May.
After eight years' absence, your correspondent is enjoying a visit among the scones of his youth. He is going about the city and is telling the towers thereof. It is of no general to know how exceed twenty stories in height. it to say that many of the business thoroughfares give the impression of canyons rather than of streets. The material prosperity of this town is beyond description, and an enumeration of the great engineering feats undertaken within the past few years would fill too much space for your crowded columns.
The heavy. rains of the past fow days have produced a nine-foot rise in ti Ohio, which releases; the vast areas of coal from the Monongahela basins or "pools" and to-day 200,000 (two hundred thousand) tons of this mineral start on their way to the lower Mississippi. This is a fraction of the six million tons that must annually find exit by river and rail, leaving the other twenty-five million tons to be consumed by the voracious furnaces and mills of the Pittsburgh district.
Many homes here are saddened to-day by the terrible disaster on the Pennsylmania Railroad at Harrisburg on, the lith instant. This trunk line has a reputation for carefulness, and has been free from serious accidents for some time. In spite of their four tracks and splendid signal system, the fates were against them when a fast fright train was derailed and two cars loaded with dynamite were thrown in front of an approaching express train from New York. The unavoidable collision which followed would of itself have resulted in small damage to life and property, but when the impact exploded a ton of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.