lowing
its embankments and desolating the whole country between it and the
Hoogli, submerged his garden and the mission grounds with three feet of
water, swept away the botanic treasures or buried them under sand, and
destroyed his own house. Carey was lying in bed at the time, under an
apparently fatal fever following dislocation of the hip-joint. He had
lost his footing when stepping from his boat. Surgical science was
then less equal to such a case than it is now, and for nine days he
suffered agony, which on the tenth resulted in fever. When hurriedly
carried out of his tottering house, which in a few hours was scoured
away by the rush of the torrent into a hole fifty feet deep, his first
thought was of his garden. For six months he used crutches, but long
before he could put foot to the ground he was carefully borne all over
the scene of desolation. His noble collection of exotic plants,
unmatched in Asia save in the Company's garden, was gone. His
scientific arrangement of orders and families was obliterated. It
seemed as if the fine barren sand of the mountain torrent would make
the paradise a desert for ever. The venerable botanist was wounded in
his keenest part, but he lost not an hour in issuing orders and writing
off for new supplies of specimens and seeds, which years after made the
place as lovely if not so precious, as before. He thus wrote to Dr.
Ryland:--

"SERAMPORE, 22nd December 1823.

"MY DEAR BROTHER--I once more address you from the land of the living,
a mercy which about two months ago I had no expectation of, nor did any
one expect it more than, nor perhaps so much as, myself. On the 1st of
October I went to Calcutta to preach, and returned with another friend
about midnight. When I got out of the boat close to our own premises,
my foot slipped and I fell; my friend also fell in the same place. I
however perceived that I could not rise, nor even make the smallest
effort to rise. The boatmen carried me into the house, and laid me on
a couch, and my friend, who was a medical man, examined my hurt.--From
all this affliction I am, through mercy, nearly restored. I am still
very weak, and the injured limb is very painful. I am unable to walk
two steps without crutches; yet my strength is sensibly increasing, and
Dr. Mellis, who attended me during the illness, says he has no doubts
of my perfect recovery.

"During my confinement, in October, such a quantity of water came down
from th