The neighbourhood of this temple, too, is not without a certain notoriety on account of the violent floods with which it has been visited even in modern times. Hutchinson speaks of a remarkable one caused by impetuous rains, which happened on the twenty-second of August, 1749, in the vale of St. John's. "The clouds discharged their torrents like a waterspout; the streams from the mountains uniting, at length became so powerful a body, as to rend up the soil, gravel, and stones to a prodigious depth, and bear with them mighty fragments of rocks; several cottages were swept away from the declivities where they had stood in safety for a century; the vale was deluged, and many of the inhabitants with their cattle were lost. A singular providence protected many lives, a little school, where all the youths of the neighbourhood were educated, at the instant crowded with its flock, stood in the very line of one of these torrents, but the hand of God, in a miraculous manner, stayed a rolling rock, in the midst of its dreadful course, which would have crushed the whole tenement with its innocents; and by its stand, the floods divided, and passed on this hand and on that, insulating the school-house, and leaving the pupils with their master, trembling at once for the dangers escaped and as spectators of the horrid havock in the valley, and the tremendous floods which encompassed them on every side." He received this account from one of the people then at school: and also gives the following description of that inundation, which he had met with. "It began with most terrible thunder and incessant lightning, the preceding day having been extremely hot and sultry; the inhabitants for two hours before the breaking of the cloud, heard a strange noise, like the wind blowing in the tops of high trees. It is thought to have been a spout or a large body of water, by which the lightning incessantly rarifying the air, broke at once on the tops of the mountains, and descended upon the valley below, which is about three miles long, half a mile broad, and lies nearly east and west, being closed on the south and north sides with prodigious high, steep, and rocky mountains. Legbert Fells on the north side, received almost the whole cataract, for the spout did not extend above a mile in length; it chiefly swelled four small brooks, but to so amazing a degree, that the largest of them, called Catchertz Ghyll, swept away a mill and other edifices in five minutes, leaving the place where they stood covered with fragments of rocks and rubbish three or four yards deep, insomuch that one of the mill stones could not be found. During the violence of the storm, the fragments of rock which rolled down the mountain, choked up the old course of this brook; but the water forcing its way through a