This was the sportive prelude of more serious trouble. Nunquam imprudentibus imber incidit:  as the servant perhaps reflected, who, on Monday, January 29th, was conveying the dinner of his master’s family from the Hotel kitchen to Cambrian Terrace.  As he crossed the gusty street between them, the harpies of the storm swept the dinner from dish, and rolled a prime joint over and over in the dust.  A leg of mutton was following, but he caught it dexterously by the knuckle-end as it fell, and rescued so much from the wreck.  Such incidents are significant:  trifles light as air, no doubt, but at least they showed which way the wind blew.  And did it not blow? for three days the sou’-wester had been heaping up the sea-water against the shores of Cardigan Bay.  People remembered with misgivings that an expected high tide coincided in time with the gale, and shook their heads significantly as they went to bed on the eve of January 30th.

In the half light before sunrise, the classes, emerging from the school-room after morning prayers, found the street between them and the Terrace threaded by a stream of salt water, which was pouring over the sea-wall in momently increasing volume.  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.