For an hour the narrow ridge on which the village stands was swept by a
storm of foam, while, from moment to moment, a wave exploding against the
crest of the ridge, would leap in through the intervals between the
houses, and carrying along a drift of sea-weed and shingle, splintered
timber, and wrecked peat-stacks, go eddying down into the drowned
pastures beyond. Yet when the ebb came, and men began to count their
losses, there were but few to record. The embankment at the south end of
the village had been beaten flat, and the road behind it buried under a
silt of shingle; the nearest houses to it had been flooded and threatened
with collapse, so that the owners were offering them next day on easy
terms; from our hospital, which stood in this quarter, the one patient
and his nurse were rescued on the backs of waders; the foundations of a
chapel, which was building on lower ground, were reported sapped, and a
staunch Churchman of our Welsh acquaintance stood rapturously contrasting
the fate of the conventicle with the security of his own place of worship
on the neighbouring knoll.
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