t 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 toward 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, with nothing but a
rat to care whether he got drowned or not.

Where was Hen Billard, that a