is safe to follow an actual canvass. Let us be up and doing. We cannot let the sobs of mothers and wives and the cries of orphans ring upon our ears without stretching forth our hand to assist in the drying of the widows and the fatherless and aiding them in their hour of need. We know not how soon a calamity of similar severity befall ourselves in one shape or another. May that day be far distant. The cause of the disaster was the breaking of a pump at the Spittlewell Ironstone pits and the drowning of the men and boys before they could be got out. Also the bursting of the embankment of the Bradfield water reservoir, by which the town of Sheffield and the country round for 12 or 14 miles were flooded. About 250 lives were lost, and property destroyed to an estimated value of £327,000.
Another Great Calamity.
True is the aphorism "water and fire are good servants, but bad masters". The narrative of disaster given in a second edition of the St. Leonards Gazette on October 1st (the day of its occurrence) and more minutely detailed in its issue of Oct 5th was one of the most terrible of its kind that had ever happened near the metropolis. It is not here attempted to relate the whole story of a calamity by which in the explosion of about 104,000 lbs of gunpowder at Plumpstead, near Woolwich thirteen persons were killed, and many were wounded, but no one can contemplate its leading features without drawing an obvious moral from it. On a Saturday morning when the inhabitants of the metropolis and its suburbs were principally asleep; a terrific sound vibrated throughout its length and breadth. The ground shook as if an earth quake was threatening to engulf the city; and over fields and roads, and far away, even to the sea-shore, the report of some terribly calamity - no one knew what at the moment made itself felt. Far distant from the scene of the calamity men and women rushed out of their dwellings to know what had occurred, whilst nearer to the scene of the disaster there was confusion dismay, destruction and death. Two magazines of gunpowder had exploded, and had carried devastation in a number of homes which a few minutes before had been shrouded in the peacefulness of sleep. The full narative of the disaster would fill a small volume with its details, harrowing in its darker episodes, an painfully instructive in its moral. It was said that upwards of one hundred thousand pounds of gunpowder exploded. The mind can hardly grasp the effects of this vast explosion. Take but one instance in the painful narrative. Near to the place where the jury met to enquire into the deaths of several persons, all about were little parcels which it was sickening to look upon. They were outwardly stained with blood, and contained human toes heels, jaws, parts of skin, portions of lungs and pieces of charred and roasted flesh. It must have been a positive relief to turn from what be called the curiosities the explosion, in which was the strange way in which death was dealt here and life was spared there, one house being greatly damaged, and another -
