f into
space. He rubbed his eyes, and found it was full daylight, although it
was the daylight of early morning; and while he lay looking out of the
stable-loft window and trying to make out what it all meant, he felt a
wash of cold water along his back, and his bed of fodder melted away under
him and around him, and some loose planks of the loft floor swam weltering
out of the window. Then he knew what had happened. The flood had stolen up
while he slept, and sapped the walls of the stable; the logs had given
way, one after another, and had let him down, with the roof, into the
water.

He got to his feet as well as he could, and floundered over the rising
and falling boards to the window in the floating gable. One look outside
showed him his mother's log-cabin safe on its rise of ground, and at the
corner the old cow, that must have escaped through the stable door he had
left open, and passed the night among the cabbages. She seemed to catch
sight of Jim Leonard when he put his head out, and she lowed to him.

Jim Leonard did not stop to make any answer. He clambered out of the
window and up onto the ridge of the roof, and there, in the company of a
large gray rat, he set out on the strangest voyage a boy ever made. In a
few moments the current swept him out into the middle of the river, and he
was sailing down between his native shore on one side and Delorac's Island
on the other.

All round him seethed and swirled the yellow flood in eddies and ripples,
where drift of all sorts danced and raced. His vessel, such as it was,
seemed seaworthy enough. It held securely together, fitting like a low,
wide cup over the water, and perhaps finding some buoyancy from the air
imprisoned in it above the window. But Jim Leonard was not satisfied, and
so far from being proud of his adventure, he was frightened worse even
than the rat which shared it. As soon as he could get his voice, he began
to shout for help to the houses on the empty shores, which seemed to fly
backward on both sides while he lay still on the gulf that swashed around
him, and tried to drown his voice before it swallowed him up. At the same
time the bridge, which had looked so far off when he first saw it, was
rushing swiftly towards him, and getting nearer and nearer.

He wondered what had become of all the people and all the boys. He thought
that if he were safe there on shore he should not be sleeping in bed while
somebody was out in the river on a roof, w