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Marlborough Express, Volume XLIV, Issue 94, 27 April 1910, Page 3

In the explosion : which, turned four Melbourne shops, into a heap of splintered matchwood recently, the most wonderful escape was that of a little girl of eight, Mabel Sneddon, says the Melbourne correspondent of a Sydney journal. She had been sleeping with another in an upstairs room two doors off the shop where the explosion occurred. A»d this is how one of the firemen who found her tells the story:—"The bed was left upstairs, hanging over, a hole in the flooring. One child fell into the storeroom below, but was not hurt. The whole floor of the room had come down into the room beneath, and lay at an angle, tons of debris being piled into the cavity. The firemen, looking at the confusion of fallen walls, were convinced that nobody underneath could have much hope of life. 'If she's there,' said one fireman, ' she's dead.' The child's voice came out of the debris, ' No, girlie's not dead,' she said. A fireman asked her whether she could see his lantern.- 'No,' she said, ' but I can see the moon; it is upside down.' In about half an hour we had her out, very little the worse. A beam had fallen in the angle of the collapsed floor and the wall, and kept the debris off her—a most wonderful escape. The tottering walls only wanted a puff of wind to bring thenv idown."