iage, were
prostrated with as much ease as if they had been fields of grain; for,
where they disputed the ground, the torrent of mud and rock accumulated
behind, till it gathered sufficient force to burst the temporary
barrier.

The valleys of the Amonoosuck and Saco presented, for many miles, an
uninterrupted scene of desolation; all the bridges being carried away,
as well as those over their tributary streams. In some places, the road
was excavated to the depth of from fifteen to twenty feet; in others, it
was covered with earth, rocks, and trees, to as great a height. The
water flowed for many weeks after the flood, as densely charged with
earth as it could be without being changed into mud, and marks were seen
in various localities of its having risen on either side of the valley
to more than twenty-five feet above its ordinary level. Many sheep and
cattle were swept away, and the Willey family, nine in number, who in
alarm had deserted their house, were destroyed on the banks of the Saco;
seven of their mangled bodies were afterwards found near the river,
buried beneath drift-wood and mountain ruins.[273] Eleven years after
the event, the deep channels worn by the avalanches of mud and stone,
and the immense heaps of boulders and blocks of granite in the river
channel, still formed, says Professor Hubbard, a picturesque feature in
the scenery.[274]

When I visited the country in 1845, eight years after Professor Hubbard,
I found the signs of devastation still very striking; I also
particularly remarked that although the surface of the bare granitic
rocks had been smoothed by the passage over them of so much mud and
stone, there were no continuous parallel and rectilinear furrows, nor
any of the fine scratches or striae which characterize _glacial_ action.
The absence of these is nowhere more clearly exemplified than in the
bare rocks over which passed the great "Willey slide" of 1826.[275]

But the catastrophes in the White Mountains are insignificant, when
compared to those which are occasioned by earthquakes, when the boundary
hills, for miles in length, are thrown down into the hollow of a valley.
I shall have opportunities of alluding to inundations of this kind, when
treating expressly of earthquakes, and shall content myself at present
with selecting an example of a flood due to a different cause.

_Flood in the valley of Bagnes_, 1818.--The valley of Bagnes is one of
the largest of the lateral embranchme