alings. He did
not miss the mother's bent form from the garden, or the bench by the
kitchen door, where she had been used to wash the milk-things.

Dorothy washed the milk-things now, and the mother spent her days in
the sunny east room, between her bed and the easy-chair, where she sat
and mused for hours over the five letters she had received from her
husband in as many months. The boys had, in a measure, justified their
father's faith in them, since Rachel's illness, and Dorothy was
released from much of her out-door work; but the silence of the
kitchen, when she was there alone with her ironing and dish-washing,
was a heavier burden than she had yet known.

Nature sometimes strikes in upon the hopeless monotony of life in
remote farm-houses, with one of her phenomenal moods. They come like
besoms of destruction; but they scatter the web of stifling routine;
they fling into the stiffening pool the stone which jars the atoms into
crystal.

The storms which had ambushed in the lurid August skies, and circled
ominously round the horizon during the first weeks of September, broke
at last in an equinoctial which was long remembered in the mill-house.
It took its place in the family calendar of momentous dates with the
hard winter of 1800; with the late frost, which coated the incipient
apples with ice, and froze the new potatoes in the ground; and with the
year the typhus got into the valley.

The rain had been falling a night and a day. It had been welcomed with
thanksgiving; but it had worn out its welcome some hours since, and now
the early darkness was coming on without a lull in the storm. Dorothy
and the two biggest boys had made the rounds of the farm-buildings,
seeing all safe for the second night. The barns and mill stood on high
ground, while the house occupied the sheltered hollow between. Little
streams from the hills were washing in turbid currents across the lower
levels; the waste-weir roared as in early spring; the garden was
inundated, and the meadow a shallow pond. The sheep had been driven
into the upper barn floor; the chickens were in the corn-bin; and old
John and the cows had been transferred from the stable, which stood
low, to the weighing-floor of the mill. A gloomy echoing and gurgling
sounded from the dark wheel-chamber, where the water was rushing under
the wheel, and jarring it with its tumult. At eight o'clock the
wood-shed was flooded, and water began to creep under the kitchen door.
D