ar it
before. They came down on the breast of the wave from as far up as
Franklin, were carried safely by the factories and the bridges, by the
big buildings at the dividing line, up and down on the flood and finally
settled in their new resting places little injured. A row of them,
packed closely together and every one tipped over at about the same
angle, is only one of the queer freaks the water played.

I got into one of these houses in my walk through the town to-day. The
lower story had been filled with water, and everything in it had been
torn out. The carpet had been split into strips on the floor by the
sheer force of the rushing tide. Heaps of mud stood in the corners.
There was not a vestige of furniture. The walls dripped with moisture.
The ceiling was gone, the windows were out, and the cold rain blew in
and the only thing that was left intact was one of those worked worsted
mottoes that you always expect to find in the homes of working people.
It still hung to the wall, and though much awry the glass and frame were
unbroken. The motto looked grimly and sadly sarcastic. It was:--

"There is no place like home."

A melancholy wreck of a home that motto looked down upon.

A Tree in a House.

I saw a wagon in the middle of a side street sticking tongue, and all,
straight up into the air, resting on its tail board, with the hind
wheels almost completely buried in the mud. I saw a house standing
exactly in the middle of Napoleon street, the side stove in by crashing
against some other house and in the hole the coffin of its owner was
placed. Some scholar's library had been strewn over the street in the
last stage of the flood, for there was a trail of good books left half
sticking in the mud and reaching for over a block. One house had been
lifted over two others in some mysterious way and then had settled down
between them and there it stuck, high up in the air, so its former
occupants might have got into it again with ladders.

Down at the lower end of the course of the stream, where its force was
greater, there was a house lying on one corner and held there by being
fastened in the deep mud. Through its side the trunk of a tree had been
driven like a lance, and there it stayed sticking out straight in the
air. In the muck was the case and key board of a square piano, and far
down the river, near the debris about the stone bridge, were its legs.
An upright piano, with all its inside apparatus clean