y, "I confess I am a sinner; we all are. But I
am a provident sinner who makes good use of the increase Thou dost send
through the earth. I do Thee to wit that Antoine Lamarche's crop is
pretty weedy. The lazy dog will have to buy of me, and if I do not skin
him well--But hold on. My blessed Master, I had forgot that Antoine has
a sick child in his house. I will set his garden in order for him.
Perhaps Thou wilt count it to me for righteousness, and let it offset
some of my iniquities."

So when he had finished his own, the friar put his hoe into his
neighbor's patch, and worked until the sweat rolled down his thin
cheeks. Gusts of rain added their moisture. As much light as the world
was to have that day filtered through sheets of vapor. The bluffs
bordering the Okaw could not be seen except as a vague bank of forest;
and as for the lowlands across the great river, they might as well have
had no existence.

It grew upon Father Baby's observation that the Mississippi had never
looked so threatening. He stuck to his hoeing until he was nearly
exhausted, and Antoine Lamarche's ground showed at least enough
improvement to offset all the cheating he had done that week, and then
made his way among bushes to the verge of the bank. The strong current
always bearing down from the northwest against the peninsula had
increased its velocity to a dizzy sweep. It bit out pieces of the shore
as large as Father Baby's shop, and far and near these were seen falling
in with splashes like the spouting of whales.

"At this rate," said Father Baby aloud, "I shall have no part left in
the common fields by next year."

The river's tremendous rolling roar was also swollen to unusual
magnitude. He looked afar over a tawny surface at undermined stumps and
trees racing past one another. The June rise, which the melting of snows
in those vague regions around its head-waters was called, had been
considerable, but nothing to terrify the Kaskaskians. One week's rain
and the drainage of the bottom lands could scarcely have raised the
river to such a height. "Though Heaven alone can tell," grumbled the
friar, "what the Mississippi will do for its own amusement. All the able
slaves in Kaskaskia should be set to work on the levee before this day
is an hour older."

Carrying the hoe on his shoulder like any laborer, and drawing the hood
of his garment over his bald crown as the mist of rain increased to a
driving sheet, Father Baby tramped along th