Skirting or jumping the obstruction they
reached the class-rooms, and work began. But before morning school was
over the stream had become a river, and thrifty housewives were keeping
out the flood from their ground-floors by impromptu dams. Those who were
well placed saw a memorable sight that morn, as the terrible white
rollers came remorselessly in, sheeting the black cliff sides in the
distance with columns of spouted foam, then thundering on the low sea-
wall, licking up or battening down the stakes of its palisades, and
scattering apart and volleying before it the pebbles built in between
them, till the village street was heaped with the ruins of the barrier
over which the waters swept victoriously into the level plain beyond:
The feet had hardly time to flee
Before it brake against the knee,
And all the world was in the sea.
Those who were looking inland saw how
Along the river's bed
A mighty eygre reared its head
And up the Lery raging sped.
And though they could not see how the tenants of the low-lying hamlet of
Ynislas fled to their upper storey as the tide plunged them into twelve
feet of water; how it breached the railway beyond, sapping four miles of
embankment, and sweeping the bodies of a drowned flock of sheep far
inland to the very foot of the hills; yet they saw enough to make them
recall the grim memories of the historic shore, and doubt if our fortunes
were not about to add a chapter to the legend of the Lost Lowland
Hundred.
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