Gellert’s Eve.” It is a story which, for its proper presentation, like an earlier one recorded, calls for the genius of a Thomas Ingoldsby. Reference at the beginning of this fearsome tale to the inundation of 1838 seems to call for fuller mention. The Pest side of the river is a plain, and in the spring of that year--the Danube having been covered with ice over three feet thick--when the break-up began the country was flooded in a disastrous fashion. At the first menace a breakwater of earth and timber six feet high was thrown up on the river-side all along the town front, but-- “Lo, upon a silent hour, When the pitch of frost subsides, Danube with a shout of power Loosens his imprisoned tides: Wide around the frighted plains Shake to hear his riven chains, Dreadfuller than heaven in wrath, As he makes himself a path: High leap the ice-cracks, towering pile Floes to bergs, and giant peers Wrestle on a drifted isle; Island on ice-island rears; Dissolution battles fast, Big the senseless Titans loom, Through a mist of common doom Striving which shall die the last.”[13] Meredith might, when writing his poem, have remembered the awful episode of 1838. When the ice broke, the water dashed through the improvised embankment, until within a few hours it was twenty-seven feet deep in some parts of the city. Street after street, building after building collapsed, until, when the waters went down and the damage could be estimated, it was said that a thousand lives have been lost and over two thousand houses entirely destroyed. Indeed, out of 4255 houses but 1147 were left intact.