78 AGRICULTUHE OX THE RHINE. 



SO great a discharge of water from the atmosphere that 

 its weight entails sudden destruction on all that it may 

 strike. Trees are rooted up, and hurled down the tor- 

 rents momentarily formed. Cattle grazing are carried off, 

 and houses, if struck by the full force of the deluge, arc 

 thrown down and washed from their sites. The infliction 

 is one to which mountainous districts are most subject. 

 That we have not exaggerated the mischief thus done, 

 will be best attested by the description of a doudbreak 

 which occun-ed in 1818, at Mlinstereifel, and destroyed 

 nearly the whole town. We extract it from Professor 

 E. M. Arndt's recently published ' Wanderings round 

 Godesberg,' feeling, as every one must who knows the 

 author or his story, that where he takes up the pen, others 

 may well lay it down. 



" It is nearly twenty-six years since the lovely spring 

 weather (I think on the fourth of May), induced me and 

 my friend Hiillmann to take a drive along the hills to 

 Briihl. Towards evening we were warned homewards 

 from a ramble under the oaks and beech trees of the park, 

 by an accumulation of thick dark clouds, out of which 

 irregular vivid flashes broke. It soon grew pitch dark, 

 and a hail-shower was followed by a violent thunder- 

 storm, and such heavy rain, that the road we drove home 

 by was broken up in different places. This storm was 

 destined to renovate Mlinstereifel. The tempest had 

 discharged a * cloudbreak ' over the town, which tore up 

 the banks and weirs of the rivulet, carrj'ing with it 

 bridges, mills, houses, in its wild track, and destroying 

 whole streets in the town, which have since been rebuilt. 

 Situated in a glen between lofty hills down which the 

 brook winds its serpentine course, the traveller cannot 



