ing with perspiration as he was, he shivered, and felt as
if icy hands were touching him as he wiped his brow.

"It's too horrid! too horrid!" he groaned, in the full belief that he
was standing right on the place from which Richard Frayne had taken a
desperate plunge. "Why, a score of his chums had better have died than
him! I didn't ought never to ha' left him last night, seeing what a
state he was in. You might ha' saved his life, Jerry, and done more
good than you'll ever do blacking boots and brushing clothes, if yer
lives to a hundred and ten."

He looked wildly to the right, and saw that the pollard willows were
rising just out of the water, like heads with the hair standing on end.
There were great patches of fresh hay floating swiftly down, and, closer
at hand, something white rolling over and over, and he shuddered; but it
was only the carcase of a drowned sheep, one of several more which had
probably been surrounded in some meadow and swept away. Directly after,
lowing dismally, and swimming hard to save itself, a bullock came down
rapidly, with its muzzle and a narrow line of backbone alone showing
above the surface.

But Jerry knew well enough that no boat could live in the rushing water
which swirled along; and, unless the poor beast could swim into some
eddy and manage to get ashore, its fate was sealed.

The man's eyes followed the animal as it passed by the broken bridge and
was swept on more rapidly downward as soon as it was below.

"I came too late--I came too late!" groaned Jerry, as he still watched
the bullock, his eyes at the same time noting how the river had passed
over the bank on the other side and spread along meadows, and how it was
threatening to lap over the road which ran upon his side away down to
the mill, where the weir crossed the river and the eel-bucks stood in a
row between the piles.

"Yes, I've come too late, and I shall see that poor brute sink directly.
Shall I go on down by the mill?"

He shook his head. The bullock was going faster than he could have
walked, and, if anyone had plunged into the river from where he stood,
he must have been swept miles away in his journey onward to the sea.

"And we shall never find him!" he muttered. "Gone! gone!"

He was going to say "Gone!" again--for the third time--but a hoarse
utterance escaped his lips instead, and he made a sudden movement to
climb over the rail and let himself down into the narrow cross-road
which ran t