s!--"

There were many more than Mrs. Mangan and her son that sat up all
through that night in the Valley of the Broadwater. Trembling people
in little low-lying cottages, with thatched roofs held in place with
ladders, and ropes, and stones, with doors and windows barricaded
against the wind. But of what avail are barricades against the
creeping white lip of water, crawling in under the doors over the
earthen floors, soaking in, through mud-built walls, coming against
them at first as a thief in the night, falling upon them later as a
strong man armed?

From the lower side-streets of Cluhir the people fled before the flood
to any shelter that the upper parts of the town could offer them.
Ghastly stories were told of drowned cattle that were swept against
the closed doors, and came pushing and banging at the windows, carried
there by their conqueror as it were with mockery, to entreat for the
succour that was too late.

When the pale dawn looked out through wind-torn clouds, it saw a
half-mile breadth of racing water where had been pasture-fields; the
yellow, foam-laced river was half way up the tall, slender arches of
Cluhir Bridge, lapping ever higher, as if in envy, to hide the sole
beauty of the ignoble town. Trees, and hayricks, broken boats, and
humble pieces of cottage furniture, jostled each other between the
piers, tossing and dancing in grotesque gaiety, like drunken
holiday-makers on their way to the sea. The great river that is
credited with exacting six lives each year, was claiming its toll. How
many it took that December night does not now concern us, save,
indeed, where one sad house was in question, where a wife and a son
waited a long night through for the man who would not return to them.

* * * * *

Down below Cluhir, at Mount Music, old Evans crept out of the
shuttered house, and fought his way in the wind, amid fallen trees,
down to the big river, to see what still stood of the boathouse. The
boathouse had weathered out the night. Its roof had held, its door
stood firm. Old Evans surveyed it with pride.

"Aha! Protestant building!" he said, old inveterate that he was.

Then he saw on the submerged bank, amid a _debris_ of broken
rushes, and clots of foam, and branches, something that he knew
instantly for what it was. The drowned body of a man.

Cautiously, and holding by shrubs and tree-stems, he reached the
place, where, half ashore, half lying in thin flo