FRIGHTFUL SCENES.

Patea Mail, Volume 1, Issue 46, 18 September 1875, Page 3

FRIGHTFUL SCENES.

The following touching incidents of the French flood will bo read with interest :—Tiie little town of Castolsarsill was caught while it slept. There, we are told, the family of a baker having no time to escape, the father got on the roof of the house, and the wife, Avith twins at the breast, embarked in a washing tub. The tub dashed against a tree and was upset. The woman, who had lashed her children around her neck, clung to a branch of the tree. She tried to got on it, but in vain, and feeling the branch giving way, she untied the twins from round her neck, and attaching them to the frail raft, made the sign of the cross, let go the branch, and went down. This scene was witnessed by a man in a tree, who had managed to rescue the body of Ids intended wife from the flood, lie held her in his arms ail night, but in the morning Ids limbs were benumbed, and she slipped from bis grasp. Numberless little facts recall the pictures of the deluge with whieh children arc familiar. In the flooded plains h-dwemi St. Tory and Castclnau a boat containing fifteen persons came into collision with a poplar tree, and was upset ; fourteen of them were drowned, and the survivor, a girl fifteen years of age,' has lost her reason. At Anterive, a family of four persons took refuge in the branches of an elm, a great part of which was swept away with the torrent, and the four people clinging to its branches were drowned. At St. (damlen’s a Newfoundland dog saved in succession fourteen persons, dashing into the rushing torrent bravely, but making the attempt the fifteenth time, the poor animal was drowned. The old town of Agdcn, midway befwoen Toulouse and the coast, was flooded in the afternoon in almost every part; the waters, pent up by a long railway embankment till they had the depth and breadth of a lake, breaking through in an instant, and carrying tinge stones from the bed of the river into the very centre of the place.