t still better when he
saw his father dressed as if he were going over to work at the forge,
all but the leather apron.

The elder did not seem disturbed. He and Mr. Murdoch were talking
about all sorts of great disasters, and Mary did not know just when she
was drawn into the talk, or how she came to acknowledge having read
about so many different things all over the world.

"Jack," whispered his mother, at last, "you'll have to go to the barn
and gather eggs, or we sha'n't have enough for supper."

"I'll bring the eggs if I don't get drowned before I get back," said
Jack; and he found a basket and an umbrella and set out.

He took advantage of a little lull in the rain, and ran to the
barn-yard gate.

"Hullo!" he exclaimed. "Now I'll have to wade. Why it's nearly a foot
deep! There'll be the biggest kind of a freshet in the Cocahutchie.
Isn't this jolly?"

The rain pattered on the roof as if it had been the head of a drum. If
the house was gloomy, the old barn was darker and gloomier. Jack
turned over a half-bushel measure and sat down on it.

"I want to think," he said. "I want to get out of this. Seems to me I
never felt it so before. I'd as lief live in this barn as stay in
Crofield."

He suddenly sprang up and shook off his blues, exclaiming: "I'll go and
see the freshet, anyhow!"

He carried the eggs into the house.

All the time he had been gone, Elder Holloway had been asking Mary very
particularly about the Crofield Academy.

"I don't wonder she says what she does about the trustees," remarked
Aunt Melinda. "She took the primary room twice, for 'most a month each
time, when the teacher was sick, and all the thanks she had was that
they didn't like it when they found it out."

The gutter in front of the house had now become a small torrent.

"All the other gutters are just like that," said Jack. "So are the
brooks all over the country, and it all runs into the Cocahutchie!"

"Father," said Jack, after supper, "I'm going down to the creek."

"I wish you would," said his father. "Come back and tell us how it's
looking."

"Could a freshet here do any damage?" asked Mr. Murdoch.

"There's a big dam up at Four Corners," said the blacksmith. "If
anything should happen there, we'd have trouble here, and you'd have it
in Mertonville, too."

Jack heard that as he was going out of the door. He carried an
umbrella; but the first thing he noticed was that the force of the rain
seemed t