From the meeting of its swift confluent streams in the grimy gorge of Pittsburgh to its lazy debouchure into the Mississippi at the swampy lowlands of Cairo the course of "the beautiful river" is 975 miles. Throughout all this meandering length there are no cataracts, and only once      at Louisville      are there rapids, evaded in navigation by a straight canal cut through a low peninsula. The width of the river varies from 1000 feet to 3000. The declivity of the banks on either hand is for the most part gentle, after the stream has cleared its native hills, and the aspect of the banks, rich as they are with "the pomp of cultivated nature," bearing for miles and miles through the state to which the river gives its name the trellised terraces of fruitful vineyards, is of a tame and languid beauty. The fluctuations in the depth of water are very great. From the shallowness to which the stream is shrunken by the summer heats to the turbid flood it rolls during the floods of spring, or, as now, the February thaw, the variation is commonly forty-five feet, is often fifty, and sometimes sixty, as in the memorable and calmitous flood of 1832, to which it is necessary to revert for comparison with the disaster of last week, which will henceforth become the measure of disaster, for at Cincinnati the river has now attained a depth of sixty-five feet and an inch, ten inches beyond the mark set fifty-one years ago; and at Louisville, even after the pent-up waters had broken down the dam, and diffused themselves over the spaces defended by it, the depth was but eight inches less. The rise of the river is thus along the whole course of the stream near twenty feet beyond the mean yearly rise.

    Words and even more graphic pictures can not convey a true sense of this ruin, much less which the submergence is that of the foundations of a great city. The image which New-Yorkers can form in their minds of the effect of a tide fifteen feet above high-water mark in the East and North rivers can be but a faint image of the wreck that has been wrought at Cincinnati. Among the most interesting features of the river are the natural terraces, sometimes seventy-five feet above its present surface, which, as geologists agree, mark the level of the bed over which it flowed, and which is composed of the alluvium it deposited, far, far back of the beginning of historic time; for the mounds which must have been built two thousand years ago conform to what are still the banks and the bed of the stream. Upon two of these terraces, the lower sixty feet above the river, the upper fifty feet above the lower, rises the city of Cincinnati, its dwellings and its shops upon the terraces, its wharves, its railway stations, and its streets of heavy traffic upon the alluvial level below, with the humbler dwellings of such citizens as constitute the shore population of a river town. The contour of the shore is slightly bowed outward, and at the lower end of the curve Mill Creek flows in to join the Ohio, while almost opposite the centre of the city, on the Kentucky side, empties the small stream which divides Covington from Newport. The spring freshets in this stream often do great damage to the wharves opposite its mouth, and in this flood also this stream, "adding its sum of more to that which had too much," has contributed its waters to the submersion of Lower Cincinnati.

    The floods of the upper Ohio were a week earlier than at Cincinnati, where no serious apprehensions were felt until Sunday, February 11. At seven o'clock that night the river was over sixty-one feet high, and rising at the rate of two inches an hour. The approaches to the bridges, including the great suspension-bridge, were cut off. The valley of Mill Creek, in which was the station of the Cincinnati sourthern road, was submerged, and traffic was almost stopped. By Monday night the river had risen nearly two feet more, the gas-works were under water, and the supply of gas exhausted, and near two thousand people had been turned out of their houses. On Tuesday the whole five miles of the river-front were under water, and the lower city was patrolled in boats. In the morning the station of the Cincinnati Southern road yielded to the sapping of its foundations, and fell apart into the flood in two pieces. It was feared that many buildings more had been so undermined that they would fall when the water subsided. Only one railroad was in complete operation. The "estimates" of the loss both of life and of wealth are mere wild tuesses, though there seems reason to believe that the former is slight, while the latter is certainly enormous. The suburbs, especially on the Kentucky side, suffered not less than the lower city; two hundred acres of the most populous part of Newport were under water. The water at the narrower parts of the river hid the whole "bottom," and stretched from the Ohio to the Kentucky hills.

    Louisville stands upon a plateau seventy feet and more above the river, and the city proper was thus inaccessible even to these unheard-of floods. But between this plateau and the river at the lower end of the city is a wide strip of alluvium bordering the rapids, which is traversed by the canal cut to avoid them, and this lowland is Shippingport. Some distance up the stream the plateau recedes, and another strip of bottom-land, the bottom of Bear Grass Creek, intervenes between it and the river. This is or was embanked with a "cut-off dam" at the upper end, and when the flood was at its hightest the level of the ground was some fifteen feet below the level of the water. On Monday night the pressure became too great for the dam to withstand. It gave way, and the water poured over it in a torrent which rapidly spread into a lake. the dwellers on the lowlands could not believe that a river beside which they had lived all their lives, and which had never washed them out of their houses before, would do so then, and most of them were in bed and asleep when the deluge overtook them. Strange to say, though the estimate of the number of people left houseless is more than 5000, the number of lives estimated to be lost is less than fifty. The suddenness andforce with which the water came in, instead of lapping itsway up inch by inch as elsewhere, crushed and carried away and flung together the fine houses in itsway, so that the lowlands at Louisville presented a far more vivid picture of chaos come again than the more destructive deluge at Cincinnati.

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