to be continued in daylight, we left a couple of men as watchers, and
were going to join the hurrying crowd, when I caught Uncle Dick's arm.

"Well?" he exclaimed.

"Did you see where those men went as they got off the raft?"

"They seemed to be climbing down into the hollow beside the river," he
said:

"Yes," I whispered with a curious catching of the breath, "and then the
flood came."

He gripped my hand, and stood thinking for a few moments.

"It is impossible to say," he cried at last. "But come along, we may be
of some service to those in trouble."

In that spirit we went on down to the lower part of the town, following
the course of the flood, and finding fresh horrors at every turn.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN.

EIGHT YEARS LATER.

Fancy the horrors of that night! The great dam about which one of my
uncles had expressed his doubts when we visited it the previous year,
and of which he had spoken as our engine, had given way in the centre of
the vast earthen wall like a railway embankment. A little crack had
grown and grown--the trickling water that came through had run into a
stream, then into a river, and then a vast breach in the embankment was
made, and a wall of water had rushed down the valley swiftly as a fast
train, carrying destruction before it.

The ruin of that night is historical, and when after a few hours we made
our way up the valley, it was to see at every turn the devastation that
had been caused. Mills and houses had been swept away as if they had
been corks, strongly-built works with massive stone walls had crumbled
away like cardboard, and their machinery had been carried down by the
great wave of water, stones, gravel, and mud.

Trees had been lifted up by their roots; rows of cottages cut in half;
banks of the valley carved out, and for miles and miles, down in the
bottom by the course of the little river, the face of the country was
changed. Here where a beautiful garden had stretched down to the stream
was a bed of gravel and sand; there where verdant meadows had lain were
sheets of mud; and in hundreds of places trees, plants, and the very
earth had been swept clear away down to where there was only solid rock.

When we reached the great embankment the main part of the water was
gone, and in the middle there was the huge gap through which it had
escaped.

"Too much water for so frail a dam," said Uncle Jack sententiously.
"Boys, we must not bemoan our loss in the face