Dawn trembled out upon a tremendous chapter of disasters, still fresh in the memory of many who witnessed it. A gray, sullen morning, with sky-glimpses of blue, hastily shown and greedily hidden, broke over Western Cornwall and uncovered the handiwork of a flood more savage in its fury and far-reaching in its effects than man's memory could parallel--a flood which already shrunk fast backward from its own havoc. To describe a single one of those valleys through which small rivers usually ran to the sea is to describe them all. Thus the torrent which raved down the coomb beneath Drift, and carried Uncle Chirgwin's massive hayrick with it like a child's toy-boat, had also uprooted acres of gooseberry bushes and raspberry canes, torn apple trees from the ground, laid waste extensive tracts of ripe produce and carried ripening roots by thousands into the sea. Beneath the orchards, as the flood subsided, there appeared great tracts of nakedness where banks of stone had been torn out of the land and scattered upon it; dead beasts stuck jammed in the low forks of trees; swine, sheep and calves appeared, cast up in fantastic places, strangled by the water; sandy wastes, stripped of every living leaf and blade, ran like banks where no banks formerly existed, and here and there from their midst stuck out naked boughs of upturned trees, fragments of man's contrivances, or the legs of dead beasts. Looking up the coomb, desolation was writ large and the utmost margins of the flood clearly recorded on branch and bough, where rubbish which had floated to the fringe of the flood was caught and hung aloft. Below, as the waters gained volume and force, Buryas Bridge, an ancient structure of three arches beneath which the trout-stream peacefully babbled under ordinary conditions, was swept headlong away and the houses hard by flooded; while the greatest desolation had fallen on those orchards lying lowest in the valley. Indeed the nearer the flood approached Newlyn the more tremendous had been the ravage wrought by it. The orchards of Talcarne valley were ruined as though artillery had swept them, and of the lesser crops scarce any at all remained. Then, bursting down Street-an-nowan, as that lane is called, the waters running high where their courses narrowed, swamped sundry cottages and leaped like a wolf on the low-lying portion of Newlyn. Here it burst through the alleys and narrow passages, drowned the basements of many tenements, isolated cottages, stores and granaries, threatened nearly a hundred lives startled from sleep by its sudden assault. Then, under the raging weather and in that babel of angry waters, brave deeds were done by the fisher folk, who chanced to be ashore. Grave personal risks were hazarded by many a man in that turbid flood, and not a few women and children were rescued with utmost danger to their saviors' lives. Yet the petty rivalry of split and riven creeds actuated not a few