By and by the voice of the struggling monster grows weaker. The persistent creatures that swarm about him assault him with renewed vigor and pertinacity. The roar of the conflict dies away by degrees. Step by step the two bands of men approach each other. Only a narrow channel remains. Presently the forces clasp hands over the chasm. In a few moments there remains but a tiny, remonstrant, murmuring trickle of water. Another stroke and it is finished. The pigmy has conquered the giant. The ant has chained the elephant. But what, in the meantime, has been the fate of the district along the levee front? Here the water does not rise slowly and stealthily as in the regions far inland, where the force of the current is lost. The planters and all their available forces, it may be, have been busily fighting the rising floods, but have been finally vanquished momentarily by wind and wave. Hoping to hold the levee, few, perhaps, have removed their families, goods, or chattels, or livestock. Then when the break comes, the raging flood rushes in over the fields and woods, demolishing out-houses, shaking cottages, drowning stock, hurling masses of drift against dwellings that might otherwise stand--seeming as though a living genius of destruction. Here a family, carrying only a few changes of clothes, and a purse but too scantily filled, hurry wildly toward the river front, in hope that a passing steamer may pick them up; there a planter who has saved his family is hurrying a drove of cattle to the levee, vaguely wondering, in the mean time, how he shall feed them if the flood lasts long; here a negro family, chattering noisily like frightened crows, trudges through water and mire knee-deep or waist-deep, bearing on their heads bundles of dirty bedding, or old clothes--one or two lugging sacks of meal and flitches of bacon, with a blind confidence that they [Illustration: RESCUING PEOPLE IN INLAND DISTRICTS.]