The river bank burst during the night, and the waters were raging into the plain, from which I missed many a brown-roofed village, which the evening before stood among its willow and poplar trees. At 11 a fair wind sprang up, junks began to move, and my boatmen, who had talked of returning, untied and moved too. After an exciting scene at a bend, where the river, leaping like a rapid, thumped the junks against the opposite shore, we passed one wrecked village after another, bits of walls of houses alone standing. The people and their fowls were in the trees. The women clung to their fowls as much as to their babies. Dugouts, scows, and a few junks, mine among them, were busy saving life, and we took three families and their fowls to Sho-wa Ku, a large junk port, where a number of houses were still standing. These families had lost all their household goods and gods, as well as mules, pigs, and dogs. On our way we sailed into a farmyard to try to get some eggs, and the junk not replying to her helm, thumped one of the undermined walls down. It was a large farmhouse and full of refugees. The water was 3 feet deep in the rooms, naked children were floating about in tubs, and the women, looking resigned, sat on the tables. The men said that it was the last of four houses, and that they might as well be dead, for they had lost all their crops and their beasts. A fearful sight presented itself at Sho-wa Ku. There the river, indefinite as it had previously been, disappeared altogether, and the whole country was a turbulent muddy sea, bounded on the east by a range of hills, and to the north and south limitless. Under it lay all the fruits of the tireless industry and garden cultivation of a large and prosperous population, and the remorseless waters under the influence of a gale were rolling in muddy surges, “crested with tawny foam,” over the fast dissolving homes. On this vast flood we embarked to shorten the distance, and sailed with three reefs in the sail for 13 miles over it, till we were brought up by an insurmountable obstacle in the shape of a tremendous rush of water where a bank had given way. There we were compelled to let go two anchors in the early afternoon. The wind had become foul, and the rain, which fell in torrents, was driven almost horizontally. Nothing that suggested human life was in sight. It might have been “the Deluge,” for the windows of heaven were opened. There were a muddy, rolling sea, and a black sky, dark with tremendous rain, and the foliage of trees with submerged trunks was alone suggestive of even vegetable life and of the villages which had been destroyed by the devouring waters.