to a world not in the least ready to receive him.

She could not have lived without that window, she would have told you,
nor without the river, which had lulled her to sleep ever since she
could remember. It was in the south chamber upstairs that she had been
born. Her mother had lain there and listened to the swirl of the water,
in that year when the river was higher than the oldest inhabitant had
ever seen it,--the year when the covered bridge at the Mills had been
carried away, and when the one at the Falls was in hourly danger of
succumbing to the force of the freshet.

All the men in both villages were working on the river, strengthening
the dam, bracing the bridge, and breaking the jams of logs; and with the
parting of the boom, the snapping of the bridge timbers, the crashing
of the logs against the rocks, and the shouts of the river-drivers,
the little Lucinda had come into the world. Some one had gone for
the father, and had found him on the river, where he had been since
day-break, drenched with the storm, blown fro his dangerous footing time
after time, but still battling with the great heaped-up masses of logs,
wrenching them from one another's grasp, and sending them down the
swollen stream.

Finally the jam broke; and a cheer of triumph burst from the excited
men, as the logs, freed from their bondage, swept down the raging
flood, on and ever on in joyous liberty, faster and faster, till they
encountered some new obstacle, when they heaped themselves together
again, like puppets of Fate, and were beaten by the waves into another
helpless surrender.

With the breaking of the jam, one dead monarch of the forest leaped into
the air as if it had been shot from a cannon's mouth, and lodged between
two jutting peaks of rock high on the river bank. Presently another log
was dashed against it, but rolled off and hurried down the stream; then
another, and still another; but no force seemed enough to drive the
giant from its intrenched position.

"Hurry on down to the next jam, Raish, and let it alone," cried the men.
"Mebbe it'll git washed off in the night, and anyhow you can't budge it
with no kind of a tool we've got here."

Then from the shore came a boy's voice calling, "There's a baby up to
your house!" And the men repeated in stentorian tones, "Baby up to your
house, Raish! Leggo the log; you're wanted!"

"Boy or girl?" shouted the young father.

"Girl!" came back the answer above the roar of the r