timber, and wrecked peat-stacks, go eddying down into the drowned
pastures beyond. Yet when the ebb came, and men began to count their
losses, there were but few to record. The embankment at the south end of
the village had been beaten flat, and the road behind it buried under a
silt of shingle; the nearest houses to it had been flooded and threatened
with collapse, so that the owners were offering them next day on easy
terms; from our hospital, which stood in this quarter, the one patient
and his nurse were rescued on the backs of waders; the foundations of a
chapel, which was building on lower ground, were reported sapped, and a
staunch Churchman of our Welsh acquaintance stood rapturously contrasting
the fate of the conventicle with the security of his own place of worship
on the neighbouring knoll. "If Borth goes, the church won't, anyhow!" he
cried, in self-forgetting fervour. No lives were lost, though several
were barely saved. One of our party rescued his dog, already straining
at his chain to escape a watery grave; another saved (dearer than life
itself) his favourite violin. A fisherman, surprised in his kitchen, was
flung down and nearly strangled between door and doorpost by the rush of
a wave through the window. A neighbour was drifted out of his house on
the top of one wave, and scrambled back to find the door slammed and held
against him by another. Rueful groups of women stood in the street,
sobbing over armfuls of what one feared might be drowned infants, but
were, in fact, the little pigs which they had plucked alive and
remonstrant from the flooded styes. In short, if many were frightened,
few could plead to being hurt.

Meanwhile, the boys had found their way from the class-rooms upon bridges
of railway-sleepers requisitioned from the station-yard. We could not
but enjoy that "something not altogether unpleasing to us in the
calamities of our neighbours," but the "humorous ruth," with which we
contemplated the comical incidents of the disaster was exchanged in good