an Lozier stood on the bluff and saw it.

Jean was watching the lights of Kaskaskia while his sick grandfather
slept. The moon was nearly full, but on such a night one forgot there
was a moon. The bushes dripped on Jean, and the valley below him was a
blur pierced by those rows of lights. A great darkness was coming out of
the northwest, whistling as it came. He saw the sky and the turbid
Mississippi meet and strangely become one. There were waters over the
heavens, and waters under the heavens. A wall like a moving dam swept
across the world and filled it. The boy found himself sitting on the
ground holding to a sapling, drenched and half drowned by the spray
which dashed up the bluffs. The darkness and hissing went over him, and
he thought he was dying without absolution, at the end of the world. He
lay down and gasped and shuddered until the great Thing was gone,--the
incredible Thing, in which no one believes except him who has seen it,
and which no name can name; that awful spirit of Deluge, which lives in
the traditions of every race. Jean had never heard of waterspout or
cloudburst or any modern name given to the Force whenever its leash is
slipped for a few minutes. He felt himself as trivial a thing in chaos
as the ant which clung on his hand and bit him because it was drowning.

The blind downpour being gone, though rain still fell and the wind
whistled in his ears, Jean climbed across bent or broken saplings nearer
the bluff's edge to look at Kaskaskia. The rows of lights were partially
blotted; and lightning, by its swift unrollings, showed him a town
standing in a lake. The Mississippi and the Okaw had become one water,
spreading as far as the eye could see. Now bells began to clamor from
that valley of foam. The bell of the Immaculate Conception, cast in
France a hundred years before, which had tolled for D'Artaguette, and
made jubilee over weddings and christenings, and almost lived the life
of the people, sent out the alarm cry of smitten metal; and a tinkling
appeal from the convent supplemented it.

There was no need of the bells to rouse Kaskaskia; they served rather as
sounding buoys in a suddenly created waterway. Peggy Morrison had come
to stay all night with Angelique Saucier. The two girls were shut in
their bedroom, and Angelique's black maid was taking the pins from
Peggy's hair, when the stone house received its shock, and shuddered
like a ship. Screams were heard from the cabins. Angelique t