Willey rose at a rather threatening angle, some two thousand feet behind the house; but it was not so savage in appearance as Mount Webster opposite, and pretty much the whole of its broad, steep wall was draped in green. In a bright June morning the little meadow farm, flecked with the nibbling sheep, and cooled by the patches of shadow flung far out over the grass from the thick maple foliage, must have seemed to a traveller pausing there, and hearing the pleasant murmur of the Saco and the shrill sweetness of the Canada Whistler, as romantic a spot as one could fly to, to escape the fever and the perils of the world.

Late in June, Mr. Willey and his wife, looking from the back windows of their house in the afternoon of a misty day, saw a large mass of the mountain above them sliding through the fog towards their meadows, and almost in a line of the house itself. Rocks and earth came plunging down, sweeping whole trees before them, that would stand erect in the swift slide for rods before they fell. The slide moved under their eye to the very foot of the mountain, and hurled its frightful burden across the road. At first they were greatly terrified, and resolved to remove from the Notch. But Mr. Willey, on reflection, felt confident that such an event was not likely to occur again; and was satisfied with building a strong hut or cave a little below the house in the Notch, which would certainly be secure, and to which the family might fly for shelter, if they should see or hear another avalanche that seemed to threaten their home.

Later in the summer there was a long hot drought. By the middle of August, the earth, to a great depth in the mountain region, was dried to powder. Then came several days of south wind betokening copious rain. On Sunday the 27th of August, the rain began to fall. On Monday the 28th, the storm was very severe, and the rain was a deluge. Towards evening, the clouds around the White Mountain range and over the Notch, to those who saw them from a distance, were very heavy, black, and awful. It was plain that they were to be busy in their office as a

Factory of river and of rain.

Later in the night they poured their burden in streams. Between nine o'clock in the evening and the dawn of Tuesday, the Saco rose twenty-four feet, and swept the whole intervale between the Notch and Conway.

The little Rocky Branch in Bartlett, a feeder of the Saco, brought down trees, rocks, and logs from the hill-side, and formed a dam near a log-cabin on its meadow, which made in a little time a pond of water that undermined and floated the house, so that the family could not escape. They climbed into the upper part of the cabin, and for hours were tossed on the mad flood, hearing the roar of the water and the storm, and expecting every moment to be crushed or drowned. The cabin, however, held together, and when the water subsided, they were rescued from their ark. Near by, on the Ellis River, which also pours into the Saco, a herd of colts were swept from a yard where they were penned, and their dead bodies were found mangled by rocks and roots several miles below. Around Ethan Crawford's house, just beyond the Notch, a pond of over two hundred acres was formed in a few hours; a bridge was dashed against a shed and carried away ninety feet of it; many of the sheep were drowned, and those which escaped "looked as though they had been washed in a mud-puddle." The water came within eighteen inches of the door, and between the house and stable a river was running. And the channel of the Ammonoosuc, near by, which on Sunday morning was a few yards wide, and overhung by interlaced trees of the ancient forest, was torn out ten times as wide by a mighty torrent that whirled off the banks and trees, and filled the broader bed with boulders, amid which in summer now the river is almost lost. In the little settlement of Gilead, also, thousands of tons of earth, rocks, and forest were loosened from the overhanging hills. The roar of the slides was far more frightful than the thunder, and the trails of fire from the rushing boulders more awful than the lightning. For hours the inhabitants were in consternation. Their houses trembled as though an earthquake shook them, and they expected, every moment, to be buried under an avalanche.

At Abel Crawford's, six miles from the Willey House, the river overflowed its banks, beat down the fences, tore up the grain, dashed to pieces a new saw-mill, swept the logs, boards, and ruins into the sand, and then circling the house, flooded the cellar, sapped part of the wall, and rose about two feet on the lower floors. Mr. Crawford was not at home; but the heroic wife placed lighted candles in the windows, and to prevent the house from being demolished by the jam that was threatening it, stood at a window near the corner, and, in the midst of the tempest, pushed away with a pole the timber, which the mad current would send as a battering ram against the walls. And now and then the lightning would show her the drowning sheep, bleating for help, which were hurried past the house in the flood.

On the morning of Tuesday the sun rose into a cloudless sky, and the air was remarkably transparent. The North Conway farmers, busy in saving what they could from the raging flood of the Saco, saw clearly how terrible the storm had been upon the Mount Washington range. The whole line was devastated by landslides. Great grooves could be distinctly seen where the torrents had torn out all the loose earth and stones, and left the solid ledge of the mountain bare. Wherever there was a brook, stones from two to five feet in diameter were rolled down by thousands, in tracks from ten to twenty rods wide, dashing huge hemlocks before them, and leaving no tree nor root of a tree in their path. Soon after, a party ascending by the Ammonoosuc counted thirty slides along the acclivity they climbed, some of which ravaged thus more than a hundred acres of the wilderness, not only mowing off the trees, but tearing out all the soil and rocks to the depth of twenty and thirty feet. And on the declivities towards North Conway, it was thought that this one storm dismantled more of the great range, during the terrible hours of that Monday night, than all the rains of a hundred years before.

What had been the fate of the little house in the Notch, and of the Willey family, during the deluge? All communication with them on Tuesday morning was cut off by the floods of the Saco. But at four

o'clock in the afternoon of Tuesday, a traveller passing Ethan Crawford's, some seven miles above the Willey House, desired, if possible, to get through the Notch that night. By swimming a horse across

the wildest part of the flood, he was put on the track. In the nar

rowest part of the road within the Notch, the water had torn out huge rocks, and left holes twenty feet deep, and had opened trenches,

also, ten feet deep and twenty feet long. But the traveller, while daylight lasted, could make his way on foot over the torn and obstructed road, and he managed to reach the lower part of the Notch just before dark. The little house was standing, but there were no human inmates to greet him. And what desolation around! The mountain behind it, once robed in beautiful green, was striped for two or three miles with ravines deep and freshly torn. The lovely little meadow in front was covered with wet sand and rocks intermixed with branches of green trees, with shivered trunks, whose splintered ends "looked similar to an old peeled birchbroom," and with dead logs, which had evidently long been buried beneath the mountain soil. Not even any of the bushes that grew up on the meadow in front of the house were to be seen. The slide from the mountain had evidently divided, not many rods above the house, against a sharp ledge of rock. It had then joined its frightful mass in front of the house, and pushed along to the bed of the Saco, covering the meadow, in some places thirty feet, with the frightful debris and mire.

The traveller entered the house and went through it. The doors were all open; the beds and their clothing showed that they had been hurriedly left; a Bible was lying open on a table, as if it had been read just before the family had departed. The traveller consoled himself, at last, with the feeling that the inmates had escaped to Abel Crawford's below, and then tried to sleep in one of the deserted beds. But in the night he heard moanings which frightened him so much, that he lay sleepless till dawn. Then he found that they were the groans of an ox in the stable, that was partly crushed under broken timbers which had fallen in. The two horses were killed. He released the ox, and went on his way towards Bartlett. Before any news of the disaster had reached Conway, the faithful dog "came down to Mr. Lovejoy's, and, by moanings, tried to make the family understand what had taken place. Not succeeding, he left, and after being seen frequently on the road, sometimes heading north, and then south, running almost at the top of his speed, as