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.