and I called H.

"Listen to that running water. What is it?"

He sprung up, listened a second, and shouted: "Max, get up! The water is
on us!" They both rushed off to the lake for the skiff. The levee had
not broken. The water was running clean over it and through the garden
fence so rapidly that by the time I dressed and got outside Max was
paddling the pirogue they had brought in among the pea-vines, gathering
all the ripe peas left above the water. We had enjoyed one mess, and he
vowed we should have another.

H. was busy nailing a raft together while he had a dry place to stand
on. Annie and I, with Reeney, had to secure the chickens, and the back
piazza was given up to them. By the time a hasty breakfast was eaten the
water was in the kitchen. The stove and everything there had to be put
up in the dining-room. Aunt Judy and Reeney had likewise to move into
the house, their floor also being covered with water. The raft had to be
floated to the storehouse and a platform built, on which everything was
elevated. At evening we looked around and counted the cost. The garden
was utterly gone. Last evening we had walked round the strawberry-beds
that fringed the whole acre and tasted a few just ripe. The hives were
swamped. Many of the chickens were drowned. Sancho had been sent to
high ground, where he could get grass. In the village everything green
was swept away. Yet we were better off than many others; for this house,
being raised, we have escaped the water indoors. It just laves the edge
of the galleries.

_May 26._--During the past week we have lived somewhat like Venetians,
with a boat at the front steps and a raft at the back. Sunday H. and I
took skiff to church. The clergyman, who is also tutor at a planter's
across the lake, preached to the few who had arrived in skiffs. We shall
not try it again, it is so troublesome getting in and out at the
court-house steps. The imprisonment is hard to endure. It threatened to
make me really ill, so every evening H. lays a thick wrap in the
pirogue, I sit on it, and we row off to the ridge of dry land running
along the lake-shore and branching off to a strip of wood also out of
water. Here we disembark and march up and down till dusk. A great deal
of the wood got wet and had to be laid out to dry on the galleries, with
clothing, and everything that must be dried. One's own trials are
intensified by the worse suffering around that we can do nothing to
relieve.

Max ha