morning, the partial subsidence of the
flood awakened a slight hope, but in an hour it rose again higher than
before. The banks which supported the house were washed away, and the
house itself seemed to be doomed, and the people were therefore sent out
of it. But Providence ordered otherwise; about four o'clock the clouds
appeared higher, the river began again to subside; by degrees a little
sloping beach became visible towards the foot of the precipice; the flood
ceased to undermine, and the house was saved.

But the ruin and devastation of the place were frightful to behold. The
shrubbery, all along the river side, with its little hill and moss-house,
had vanished; two stone and three wooden buildings were carried off; the
beautiful fringe of wood on both sides of the river, with the ground it
grew on, were washed to the ocean, together with all those sweet and
pastoral projections of the fields which gave so peaceful and fertile a
character to the valley; whilst the once green island, robbed of its
groups of trees and furrowed by a dozen channels, was covered with large
stones, gravel, and torn-up roots.

At another part of the same river (the Divie) Sir Thomas describes, from
his own observations, the progress of the flood. The noise was a
distinct combination of two kinds of sound: one, an uniform continued
roar; the other, like rapidly repeated discharges of cannon. The first
of these proceeded from the violence of the water; the other, which was
heard through it, and as it were muffled by it, came from the numerous
stones which the stream was hurling over its uneven bed of rock. Above
all this was heard the shrieking of the wind. The leaves were stripped
off the trees and whirled into the air, and their thick boughs and stems
were bending and cracking beneath the tempest. The rain was descending
in sheets, not in drops: and a peculiar lurid, bronze-like hue pervaded
the whole face of nature. And now the magnificent trees were overthrown
faster and faster, offering no more resistance than reeds before the
mower's scythe. Numerous as they were, they were all, individually,
well-known friends. Each, as it fell, gave one enormous plash on the
surface, then a plunge, the root upwards above water for a moment; again
all was submerged--and then up rose the stem disbranched and peeled;
after which, they either toiled round in the cauldron, or darted, like
arrows, down the stream. "A chill ran through our hear