Not far from this, Little found Ransome, working like a horse, with the tear in his eyes.

He uttered a shout of delight and surprise, and, taking Little by both shoulders, gazed earnestly at him, and said, “Can this be a living man I see?”

“Yes, I am alive,” said Little, “but I had to work for it:  feel my clothes.”

“Why, the are dryer than mine.”

“Ay; yet have been in water to the throat; the heat of my body and my great exertions dried them.  I’ll tell you all another day:  now show me how to do a bit of good; for it is not one nor two thousand pounds I’ll stick at, this night.”

“Come on.”

Strange sights they saw that night.

They found a dead body curled round the top frame of a lamppost, and, in the suburbs, another jammed between a beam and the wall of a house.

They found some houses with the front wall carried clean away, and, on the second floor, such of the inmates as had survived huddled together in their night-clothes, unable to get down.  These, Ransome and his men speedily relieved from their situation.

And now came in word that the whole village of Poma Bridge had been destroyed.

Little, with Ransome and his men, hurried on at these sad tidings as fast as the mud and ruins would allow, and, on the way, one of the policemen trod on something soft.  It was the body of a woman imbedded in the mud.

A little further they saw, at some distance, two cottages in a row, both gutted and emptied.  An old man was alone in one, seated on the ground-floor in the deep mud.

They went to him, and asked what they could do for him.

“Do?  Why let me die,” he said.

They tried to encourage him; but he answered them in words that showed how deeply old Shylock’s speech is founded in nature: 

“Let the water take me—­it has taken all I had.”

When they asked after his neighbors, he said he believed they were all drowned.  Unluckily for him, he had been out when the flood came.

Little clambered into the other cottage, and found a little boy and girl placidly asleep in a cupboard upstairs.

Little yelled with delight, and kissed them, and cuddled them, as if they had been his own, so sweet was it to see their pretty innocent faces, spared by death.  The boy kissed him in return, and told him the room had been full of water, and dada and mamma had gone out at the window, and they themselves had floated in the bed so high he had put his little sister on the top shelf, and got on it himself, and then they had both felt very sleepy.

“You are a dear good boy, and I take you into custody,” said Ransome, in a broken voice.

Judge if this pair were petted, up at the Town Hall.

At Poma Bridge the devastation was horrible.  The flood had bombarded a row of fifty houses, and demolished them so utterly that only one arch of one cellar remained; the very foundations were torn up, and huge holes of incredible breadth and depth bored by the furious eddies.