from summit to base. Then storm followed storm, bursting
through the mountain-notch and sweeping the river into the meadows,
where the haycocks were already afloat, and the gaunt mountain cattle
floundered bellowing.

The stage from White Lake arrived at noon with the mail, and the driver
walked into the post-office and slammed the soaking mail-sack on the
floor.

"Gracious!" said the little postmistress.

"Yes'm," said the stage-driver, irrelevantly; "them letters is wetter
an' I'm madder 'n a swimmin' shanghai! Upsot? Yes'm--in Snow Brook.
Road's awash, meadders is flooded, an' the water's a-swashin' an'
a-sloshin' in them there galoshes." He waved one foot about carelessly,
scattering muddy spray, then balanced himself alternately on heels and
toes to hear the water wheeze in his drenched boots.

"There must be a hole in the mail-pouch," said the postmistress, in
gentle distress.

There certainly was. The letters were soaked; the wrappers on newspaper
and parcel had become detached; the interior of the government's
mail-pouch resembled the preliminary stages of a paper-pulp vat. But the
postmistress worked so diligently among the debris that by one o'clock
she had sorted and placed in separate numbered boxes every letter,
newspaper, and parcel--save one.

That one was a letter directed to

"_James Helm, Esq._
"_Nauvoo_, via _White Lake_."

and it was so wet and the gum that sealed it was so nearly dissolved
that the postmistress decided to place it between blotters, pile two
volumes of government agricultural reports on it, and leave it until
dry.

One by one the population of Nauvoo came dripping into the post-office
for the mail, then slopped out into the storm again, umbrellas couched
in the teeth of the wind. But James Helm did not come for his letter.

The postmistress sat alone in her office and looked out into her garden.
It was a very wet garden; the hollyhocks still raised their flowered
spikes in the air; the nasturtiums, the verbenas, and the pansies were
beaten down and lying prone in muddy puddles. She wondered whether they
would ever raise their heads again--those delicate flower faces that she
knew so well, her only friends in Nauvoo.

Through the long drought she had tended them, ministering to their
thirst, protecting them from their enemies the weeds, and from the
great, fuzzy, brown-and-yellow caterpillars that travelled over the
fences, guided by instinct and a ragin