That which we have described to us is a vast penal catastrophe sweeping away some great centre of civilization by means of a terrible inundation. Along some ocean-border the far-stretching plains were dotted thickly with towns and villages. There were fields waving with corn; the vine and the olive, the orange and the palm abounded; there were cattle feeding in green pastures beside the still waters; there were populous tribes and nations carrying on all the business and revelry of life; they bought, they sold, they builded, they planted, they were marrying and giving in marriage, when suddenly the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the earthquake wave rolled in upon them, and swept all the beauty and the glory and the sin remorselessly away. At the same time, the angry heavens were overcast, and the floodgates of the clouds poured down their volumes of ceaselessly-descending rain. The distant mountains were torn from the sight; nay, every high hill under the whole heaven was itself covered and enfolded in a liquid veil, for every rill was now a torrent, every tiny silver thread of a cascade now a dark unbroken avalanche of waters. One family alone, alone obedient to the warning which all had received, were saved amidst this universal ruin, and took with them into the ark of their refuge specimens of every bird and beast and creeping thing that their own country produced, and that was in any way serviceable to man. When cloud and mist had rolled away from the mountain-tops, when the face of the ground was once more dry--with these creatures they stocked their new settlement. The well-watered plain was speedily replenished; the vine flourished; the cattle brought forth abundantly; the children of the patriarch multiplied rapidly and spread far and wide over their rich and undisputed inheritance. Such is the narrative as it glimmers through the haze of forty centuries, only told in the original with unrivalled simplicity and force, grander than any description by forbearing to describe, told as one would tell it, who in that convulsion of nature had lost kindred, friends and countrymen, as one who had seen the whole world, so far as he knew it or cared for it, foundering in the waves, and yet had lived on through all the unutterable calamity to see himself once more surrounded by fruitful fields and smiling homesteads, and all that might make what was to him emphatically a new world the counterpart of the old.