ther, but jest the gentle leadin's o' the Mr. Chisholm? "Tis Grick to me!" "He means he juist set his fut doun, Ou, ay, ye may trust him." Ashton Hilliers.

(To be continued.)

THE SEINE IN FLOOD.

rain swept down and drenched the mattress and its poor despairing owner as thoroughly as though they had fallen in the Seine. All the time the Seine was rising remorselessly, and those whose houses were threatened gathered along the banks in the rain watching the river with the silence of utter dejection, though some of the braver spirits were building walls of masonry across their thresholds, walls over which a few hours later the river had risen.

At Bercy, within the fortifications, the quay was under water. The scene was indescribably desolate; a long row of cheerless houses three feet deep in water, as far as the eye could see; a double row of lighted gas-lamps burning pale and absurd in the gray daylight, because the flood had made it impossible to extinguish them; a punt conveying a workman to his flooded home, poled slowly along by two policemen, and bumping monotonously against the poplars and sunken railings; two soldiers on a flimsy raft that the most destitute of mariners would have scorned, steering an erratic course as one of them paddled desperately with a tin pan; and only one bright touch. From the sixth story of one of the beleaguered houses a scarlet duster shaken by some careful housewife waved defiance to the river.

A day or two later and the Seine was working havoc in the very heart of the city. On the left bank the defences were weakened by the low-level railway lines running from the great Orleans terminus of the Quai d'Orsay to the Austerlitz station, and from the Esplanade des Invalides to the Auteuil viaduct. The whole length of these lines was flooded twenty feet deep. The Seine actually flowed through the Orsay terminus as the water poured on to the line higher up the river and then fell back into the Seine through the ventilation shafts of the station, which looked for all the world like a swimLIVING AGE. VOL. XLVII. 2443

was

ming bath. Only the iron gallery, on a level with the entrance from the road, left unsubmerged; the central depth had been converted into a huge tank of muddy water, while the sightseer looked vainly for the engines and carriages that lay drowned beneath. The unfinished works of the Metropolitan railway running from north to south had been converted into a subterranean river at right angles to the Seine two miles long, and were flooding squares and streets a mile away near the St. Lazare Station. On the right bank the river was threatening to overflow the embankments, and the problem of defence became a difficult one; for the damage done by the inundation of the Saint Germain quarter by the water from the Orsay station, and of many streets in the central districts by percolation, would have been nothing to the havoc that would have been wrought by the direct sweep of the Seine over the embankments on the right bank. One of the difficulties of the situation was the Pont de l'Alma, which, with its low arches, was almost submerged, and held back in the centre of Paris great masses of water that threatened to sweep over the quays.

One evening while the river was still rising, the last of the traditional Boulevard cafés where the foreign tourist is still regarded as an interloper was filled with its usual crowd of habitués; mostly journalists or literary men, they all knew one another at least by sight, and conversation went on merrily at the little tables despite the stifling atmosphere, while an eccentric band jerked out the latest tunes that had come down from Montmartre. The only topic of conversation was the flood; and it was discussed with the true Parisian air of persiflage and detachment, though some of the wildest jesters would have later in the evening to take boats to reach their homes. Suddenly, no one knew how or whence, a rumor

ran through the café that the central span of the Pont de l'Alma had been blown up to allow the river to pass more freely. Everyone there seemed to learn it at the same instant from some invisible agency, and for a few seconds there was a silence that suggested dismay. A journalist hurriedly gulped down the coffee that had been standing for the last hour before him, paid the waiter, and rushed out into the snowy night. Then the band struck up a new tune and the buzz of conversation burst out anew; the tone was the same, but the gaiety was rather forced, and witticisms at the expense of the Pout de l'Alma fell flat, for every true Parisian felt that a little piece of his beloved city had perished. The rumor was a false one, and the Pont de l'Alma was still standing sturdily as ever against the flood. On the approaches to the bridge a whispering crowd had gathered waiting to see how dynamite and the river would work its destruction, or failing that strong sensation, curious as to what would happen when the river reached the keystone of the highest span. The bridge was closed to the public, but for the privileged observer whom the police officer in charge allowed to pass with a whispered "A vos propres risques et périls-méfiez-vous!" the scene was terrible and splendid.

Standing over the central span of the deserted bridge I watched that night the yellow river, too turbid to reflect the scattered lights on the half-submerged embankments, as it swept down "too full for sound or foam" between the snow-covered barges and pontoons. The Seine was silent, absolutely silent, but the impression of irresistible might and headlong speed gave its silence the quality of a song of triumph, the triumph of a malignant deity over the works of man. stillness was only broken by the continuous boom of the driftwood as it

The

struck the masonry beneath with a sound like distant musketry. At a little distance the river seemed higher than the keystone, though there was a foot or two to spare, and as it rushed on its waters were sucked down through the arches into an unfathomable gulf. In the wicked yellow light that proceeded mysteriously from the river itself the colossal stone soldiers of the Second Empire that guard the piers of the Pont de l'Alma, shoulderdeep in the angry river, their caps white with snow, stood motionless at their posts as befitted veterans of the Crimea, and bore up with heroic indifference great masses of driftwood which swayed uneasily in the current.

Down the river one realized that the Boulevards themselves, with their brilliance and gaiety, their rich shops, cafés, and theatres, were almost within the river's reach; there were only a few sandbags and a plank or two between the Boulevardier sipping his coffee in the café half a mile away, and cold, foul water, which, though it had not yet swept over the earthworks of defence, was finding its treacherous way through hidden channels into the best-defended quarters of the town, flooding basements and cellars, tearing up drains and electric cables, and working mischief with all the malicious caprice of Nature uncontrolled.

Up the Seine on the right bank men were working for dear life by the light of naphtha flares to raise the earthworks along the parapet of the embankment. The Quai de la Conférence and the fashionable avenue of Cours-la-Reine were deep in water, but a thin line of sandbags backed here and there by wooden screens still kept back the surface flood.

As the river rose, and it rose eventually over five feet above the level of the embankment, the military engineers raised the height of the barrier, which was half a mile long. That night the water was steadily creeping

higher and higher, while a civil engineer, mud-bespattered, with the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his button-hole, was standing on the corner of the sandbag bastion by the Pont de la Concorde and measuring its advance. He turned to a stranger beside him and said: "The river is still rising as fast as ever. If the barrier goes, five feet of water will sweep across the Place de la Concorde, the Boulevards-over everywhere,"

he

The roadway along the southern façade of the Louvre was all uneven with the pressure of the overflowing drains beneath it, as though an earthquake had passed, and it sagged down suddenly just beneath the balcony of the splendid Jean-Goujon door. Here, out of sight of the anxious crowd, there was a scene of feverish activity. Men were tearing up cobbles from the road and building a rough wall across a gap in the parapet, where a flight of steps goes down to the river. There was need of haste; for the water that looked black and stagnant in the glare of the naphtha flares was creeping up apace and licking the lowest tier of cobbles. Others were recklessly digging great holes in the footpath between the poplars, and ramming the earth into bags, or nailing together great pieces of driftwood, fished from the river, to form a screen behind the sandbags on the parapet and hold them against the pressure of the current, while carts kept rumbling in and unloading piles of stone and rubble against the wall and screen. I glanced over the screen that reached my chin, expecting to see the river five feet or so below me, and drew back with a start of alarm when I saw the gleam of water above the stone parapet and realized that it was only held back by the flimsy barrier. A few hours later and the river would have won; all the basements of the Louvre would have been flooded, and the water would have carried ruin across the Rue de Rivoli and the Palais Royal.

added with an expressive gesture, “until it meets the flood that the Metropolitan is pouring out round the Saint Lazare Station." Then abruptly he turned to a non-commissioned officer awaiting orders behind him, "Give me another tier of sandbags." Orders were hoarsely shouted, and a crowd of little black figures, each shouldering a sandbag, swarmed like ants along the narrow earthwork, on the one side a few inches above the river, on the other a foot or so above the flood that lay deep on the embankment and on the Avenue of Cours-la-Reine. Weary as they were after three days' unceasing toil, each man swung his sandbag into its place with a will, and burst into a soldiers' chorus that sounded strangely merry amid the desolation around.

That night the Quai du Louvre was barred off by the police, and a silent crowd gathered at the barrier though nothing could be seen, anxious for the safety of the collections that are the pride of France. In the mist the Seine seemed as broad as the Rhine at Cologne, and the eye of fancy could descry Notre Dame between two raging floods, splendid and fearless in the majesty of its builders' faith. At this point the river flows beneath the Pout des Arts, and as its water poured through the iron supports of the bridge It made the little rippling noise of a hundred small cascades, a sound like malicious laughter even more terrible than its silence.

It was no wonder that a sense of impending disaster hung over Paris; yet there was much in the situation that was simply comic. The special envoys of the King of the Belgians, invited to a lunch at the Foreign Office, were carried there in a large flat-bottomed boat poled by a couple of waterNaval boats of the collapsible Berthon pattern were to be seen on

men.