The flood of the previous Autumn, when a coach and horses had been swept down the Irwell, and men and women were drowned, was as nothing to this. The tannery yard, high as it was above the bed of the Irk, and solid as was its embankment, was threatened with invasion. The surging water roared and beat against its masonry, and licked its coping with frothy tongue and lip, like a hungry giant, greedy for fresh food. Men with thick clogs and hide-bound legs, leathern gloves and aprons, were hurrying to and fro with barrows and bark-boxes for the reception of the valuable hides which their mates, armed with long-shafted hooks and tongs, were dragging from the pits pell-mell, ere the advancing waters should encroach upon their territory, and empty the tan-pits for them. Already the insatiate flood bore testimony to its ruthless greed. Hanks of yarn, pieces of calico, hay, uptorn bushes, planks, chairs, boxes, dog-kennels, and hen-coops, a shattered chest of drawers, pots and pans, had swept past, swirling and eddying in the flood, which by this time spread like a vast lake over the opposite lands, and had risen within three feet of the arch of Scotland Bridge, and hardly left a trace where the mill-dam chafed it commonly. Too busy were the tanners, under the eye of their master, to stretch out hand or hook to arrest the progress of either furniture or live stock, though beehives and hen-coops, and more than one squealing pig, went racing with the current, now rising towards the footway of Tanner’s Bridge. Every window of every house upon the banks was crowded with anxious heads, for flooded Scotland rose like an island from the watery waste, and their own cellars were fast filling. There had been voices calling to each other from window to window all the morning; but now from window to window, from house to house, rang one reduplicated shriek, which caused many of the busy tanners to quit their work, and rush to the water’s edge. To their horror, a painted wooden cradle, which had crossed the deeply-submerged dam in safety, was floating foot-foremost down to destruction, with an infant calmly sleeping in its bed; the very motion of the waters having seemingly lulled it to sounder repose! “Good Lord! It’s a choilt!” exclaimed Simon Clegg, the eldest tanner in the yard. “Lend a hand here, fur the sake o’ th’ childer at whoam.”