GREAT INUNDATION OF 1571. There are ancient town records in nearly all the seacoast towns of Lincolnshire which tell of the inundation of 1571. There was then as there is now, a chime of bells in the tower of St. Botolph, Boston, and when the tide was seen to be sweeping away the barriers the Mayor of Boston himself mounted the belfry stairs and had played the old love song called “The Brides of Enderby” as an alarm to the country side. But the tide came so unheralded, there having been no premonition of it in storm or tempest, that the meaning of the chimes was not understood. Savants have never had an explanation of the Lincolnshire tide, coming as it did so unheralded by anything threatening a cataclysm. The flood found the people unprepared and thousands fell victims to its fury. There is nothing in literature, and nothing of course in the musty archives of the Lincolnshire towns, conveying as vivid an impression of the horror of the day and night as the Ingelow verses. They are written in the old, and what now seems to us the quaint, English of that day. The story is told by an old woman whose daughter, out with her two children looking and calling for the cows at eventide, is overwhelmed and drowned. A REAL TRAGEDY AT GALVESTON. Perhaps it is a safe conclusion that the tragedy poetry as set for us on the Lincolnshire stage had found expression in real life along the Texas coasts. The old Lincolnshire woman’s plaintive narrative has never seemed unreal, because it is filled with the spirit of a homely life, but just now it seems like a voice from out the past telling us of the tragedy now at our doors. The poem is a very long one, but a few selections from its narration of the widespread desolation of the country will picture much of the gulf coast of Texas at this time. The cry of the housewife for the cattle dies out in the evening stillness and then the old dame sees the flood: And lo, along the river’s bed A mighty eygre reared his crest, And up the river raging sped. It swept with thunderous noises loud— Shaped like a curling, snow-white cloud, Or like a demon in a shroud. And rearing Lindus, backward pressed, Shook all her trembling banks amain, Then madly at the eygre’s breast Flung uppe her weltering walls again, Then bankes came down with ruin and rout, Then beaten foam flew round about, Then all the mighty floods were out. So farre, so fast the eygre drave The heart had hardly time to beat Before a shallow seething wave Sobbed in the grasses at our feet; The feet had hardly time to flee Before it brake against the knee— And all the world was in the sea.