At a ball given at a fashionable hotel . . .

. . . in Rio Janeiro last month, during the dancing of the Lancers, the ball-room was suddenly inundated by a rise in the river, the ladies being forced to get on the chairs and into the orchestra.  In a few moments the water in the room was two feet deep, and many valuable jewels were lost.  The ladies, who were all wet, were eventually carried in the arms of the people to the upper rooms of the hotel.  The inundation subsided in about two hours.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 15, 1862, p. 3