-

'Don't be a young ass! Have you got any matches? My bed's full of water;
it's pouring down from the ceiling.'

Oswald's first thoughts was that perhaps by opening those sluices we
had flooded some secret passage which communicated with the top of Moat
House, but when he was properly awake he saw that this could not be, on
account of the river being so low.

He had matches. He is, as I said before, a boy full of resources. He
struck one and lit a candle, and Dicky, for it was indeed he, gazed with
Oswald at the amazing spectacle.

Our bedroom floor was all wet in patches. Dicky's bed stood in a pond,
and from the ceiling water was dripping in rich profusion at a dozen
different places. There was a great wet patch in the ceiling, and that
was blue, instead of white like the dry part, and the water dripped from
different parts of it.

In a moment Oswald was quite unmanned.

'Krikey!' he said, in a heart-broken tone, and remained an instant
plunged in thought.

'What on earth are we to do?' Dicky said.

And really for a short time even Oswald did not know. It was a
blood-curdling event, a regular facer. Albert's uncle had gone to London
that day to stay till the next. Yet something must be done.

The first thing was to rouse the unconscious others from their deep
sleep, because the water was beginning to drip on to their beds, and
though as yet they knew it not, there was quite a pool on Noel's bed,
just in the hollow behind where his knees were doubled up, and one of
H. O.'s boots was full of water, that surged wildly out when Oswald
happened to kick it over.

We woke them--a difficult task, but we did not shrink from it.

Then we said, 'Get up, there is a flood! Wake up, or you will be drowned
in your beds! And it's half past two by Oswald's watch.'

They awoke slowly and very stupidly. H. O. was the slowest and
stupidest.

The water poured faster and faster from the ceiling.

We looked at each other and turned pale, and Noel said--

'Hadn't we better call Mrs Pettigrew?'

But Oswald simply couldn't consent to this. He could not get rid of the
feeling that this was our fault somehow for meddling with the river,
though of course the clear star of reason told him it could not possibly
be the case.

We all devoted ourselves, heart and soul, to the work before us. We
put the bath under the worst and wettest place, and the jugs and basins
under lesser streams, and we moved the beds away to the dry