It is not often that one sees two lakes nearly three miles distant from one another suddenly run together and become a roaring sea, not often that two rivers are apparently obliterated, lost beneath an overwhelming mass of white water mile on mile.  Nor is it likely that more than once in a generation the inhabitants of a neighbouring town find themselves suddenly, when they rise from their beds on a Sunday morning, cut off from all access to their ancient parish church, hear no bells ring across the water flood, and feel that they must seek out some new house of prayer for this day, and leave the graves of their kin unvisited, the seats of their Sabbath use untenanted. (p. 808)

But in our Lake country, if after a hard dry time in October—as dry as the driest summers—when the salmon are waiting down in the lake, and cannot make for their spawning beds; when the children run across the river weirs, and the wells are beginning to give out at the farms; if then, with hardly a fall in the barometer, a south-west wind arises, and drives the wild Atlantic mists in moving mountains of cloud ashore, and if rain falls for two consecutive days to the depth of four inches, and then the wind increasing almost to a cyclone, drives sheets of water upon the fell-side breasts, so that in twenty-four hours another four inches of rain is chronicled in the rain-gauge, then we may expect just such a flood as it was my fortune to witness on Sunday morning, October 28th, in the Keswick Vale. (p. 808)  

(Murray’s Magazine, 3 (December 1888), 808-19)