43 THE NOACHIAN FLOOD. 



a dark unbroken avalanche of waters. One family alone, 

 alone obedient to the warning which all had received, 

 were saved amidst this universal ruin, and took with 

 them into the ark of their refuge specimens of every 

 bird and beast and creeping thing that their own 

 country produced, and that was in any way serviceable 

 to man. When cloud and mist had rolled away from 

 the mountain-tops, when the face of the ground was 

 once more dry with these creatures they stocked their 

 new settlement. The well-watered plain was speedily 

 replenished ; the vine nourished ; the cattle brought 

 forth abundantly ; the children of the patriarch multi- 

 plied rapidly and spread far and wide over their rich and 

 undisputed inheritance. 



Such is the narrative as it glimmers through the haze 

 of forty centuries, only told in the original with unri- 

 valled simplicity and force, grander than any description 

 by forbearing to describe, told as one would tell it, who 

 in that convulsion of nature had lost kindred, friends 

 and countrymen, as one who had seen the whole world, 

 so far as he knew it or cared for it, foundering in the 

 waves, and yet had lived on through all the unutterable 

 calamity to see himself once more surrounded by fruitful 

 fields and smiling homesteads, and all that might make 

 what was to him emphatically a new world the counter- 

 part of the old. 



Some may permit themselves for a moment to set 

 aside the limitation we have suggested to the number of 

 animals in the ark as fanciful and unwarranted. It will 

 be proper therefore to draw out the consequences attach- 



