Page:Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since.djvu/149

 proach; or supporting themselves on their slippery surface, collected the drift-wood which adhered to them. Other labourers were busily employed in replacing bridges, which the swollen waters had injured or destroyed; for seldom did the spring-tide floods pass N, but the faces of the inhabitants gathered gloom from the prospect of an additional weight of taxation. While the solitary amateur admired the wrath of the resounding streams, the richer, and less romantic burgher would calculate the cost, like Marlow in the well-furnished inn, apprehending, "how horridly a fine side-board, and marble chimney-piece would swell the reckoning." But the labourers, who had nothing to pay, and foresaw gain from being employed about broken bridges, and dilapidated fences, contented themselves with lamenting, in a less rueful tone, the evils of their almost insular situation. Considerable loss and suffering had frequently been sustained in the southern extreme of the town, which occupied the ground at the junction of the two principal rivers. These waters, when swollen by dissolving snows, and the in creased revenue of their tributaries, came rushing down with great power. Inundated streets, merchants lamenting the loss of their goods, and sometimes of the warehouses which contained them, or millers gazing with uplifted hands after their floating fabrics, attested the ravages of the triumphant flood. Here and there, the sharp eaves of a fisherman's hut, or the upper story of some building of larger dimensions would rise above the encompassing