s, I see nothing but water, pattering on the deck from the
lowering clouds, dashing against the window, dripping from the willows,
hissing by the wheels, everywhere washing, coiling, sapping, hurrying in
rapids, or swelling at last into deeper and vaster lakes, awful in their
suggestive quiet and concealment.

As day fades into night the monotony of this strange prospect grows
oppressive. I seek the engine room, and in the company of some of the
few half-drowned sufferers we have already picked up from temporary
rafts, I forget the general aspect of desolation in their individual
misery. Later we meet the San Francisco packet, and transfer a number
of our passengers. From them we learn how inward-bound vessels report
to have struck the well-defined channel of the Sacramento, fifty miles
beyond the bar. There is a voluntary contribution taken among the
generous travelers for the use of our afflicted, and we part company
with a hearty "Godspeed" on either side. But our signal lights are not
far distant before a familiar sound comes back to us--an indomitable
Yankee cheer--which scatters the gloom.

Our course is altered, and we are steaming over the obliterated banks
far in the interior. Once or twice black objects loom up near us--the
wrecks of houses floating by. There is a slight rift in the sky toward
the north, and a few bearing stars to guide us over the waste. As we
penetrate into shallower water, it is deemed advisable to divide our
party into smaller boats, and diverge over the submerged prairie. I
borrow a peacoat of one of the crew, and in that practical disguise
am doubtfully permitted to pass into one of the boats. We give way
northerly. It is quite dark yet, although the rift of cloud has widened.

It must have been about three o'clock, and we were lying upon our oars
in an eddy formed by a clump of cottonwood, and the light of the steamer
is a solitary, bright star in the distance, when the silence is broken
by the "bow oar":

"Light ahead."

All eyes are turned in that direction. In a few seconds a twinkling
light appears, shines steadily, and again disappears as if by the
shifting position of some black object apparently drifting close upon
us.

"Stern, all; a steamer!"

"Hold hard there! Steamer be damned!" is the reply of the coxswain.
"It's a house, and a big one too."

It is a big one, looming in the starlight like a huge fragment of the
darkness. The light comes from a single candle, which