But Little started to his feet, and cried “Hurrah!”

There was a general groan.

“Hold your tongues,” he roared.  “I’ve got good news for you.  The water was over the top windows; now it is an inch lower.  The reservoir must be empty by now.  The water will go down as fast as it rose.  Keep quiet for two minutes, and you will see.”

Then no more was heard but the whimpering of the women, and, every now and then, the voice of Little; he hung over the parapet, and reported every half-minute the decline of the water; it subsided with strange rapidity, as he had foreseen.

In three minutes after he had noticed the first decline, he took Grace down through the roof, on the second floor.

When Grace and Henry got there, they started with dismay:  the danger was not over:  the front wall was blown clean out by the water; all but a jagged piece shaped like a crescent, and it seemed a miracle that the roof, thus weakened and crowded with human beings, had not fallen in.

“We must get out of this,” said Little.  “It all hangs together by a thread.”

He called the others down from the roof, and tried to get down by the staircase, but it was broken into sections and floating about.  Then he cut into the floor near the wall, and, to his infinite surprise, found the first floor within four feet of him.  The flood had lifted it bodily more than six feet.

He dropped on to it, and made Grace let herself down to him, he holding her round the waist, and landing her light as a feather.

Henry then hacked through the door, which was jammed tight; and, the water subsiding, presently the wrecks of the staircase left off floating, and stuck in the mud and water:  by this means they managed to get down, and found themselves in a layer of mud, and stones, and debris, alive and dead, such as no imagination had hitherto conceived.

Dreading, however, to remain in a house so disemboweled within, and so shattered without, that it seemed to survive by mere cohesion of mortar, he begged Grace to put her arm round his neck, and then lifted her and carried her out into the night.

“Take me home to papa, my angel,” said she.

He said he would; and tried to find his way to the road which he knew led up the hill to Woodbine Villa.  But all landmarks were gone; houses, trees, hedges, all swept away; roads covered three feet thick with rocks, and stones, and bricks, and carcasses.  The pleasant valley was one horrid quagmire, in which he could take few steps, burdened as he was, without sticking, or stumbling against some sure sign of destruction and death:  within the compass of fifty yards he found a steam-boiler and its appurtenances (they must have weighed some tons, yet they had been driven more than a mile), and a dead cow, and the body of a wagon turned upside down:  [the wheels of this same wagon were afterward found fifteen miles from the body].