ne. Ararat, a muddy pyramid dotted here and there
with olive trees--curious, by the way, to find olives so high!--in the
receding waters the vagrant raven cheerfully picking out the eye of a
defunct pterodactyl. The heavy clouds rolling off the sodden world--they
must have indeed been heavy clouds, nimbus of the first water--as they had
raised the world's water-level 250 feet per day during "the flood" ...
surely a record output!

The primeval family party, sadly poking about along the expanding margin
of the world, noting how Abel Brown's tall chimney was beginning to show,
and how Cain Jones' wigwam was clean gone. Mrs. Shem said she knew it
would, the mortar work had been so terribly scamped.

And Naboth Robinson's vineyard--well, _it_ was in a pretty mess, to be
sure, and serve him right, for Mrs. Noah had frequently offered him two of
her (second) best milch mammoths for it; yet he had held on to his nasty
sour grapes, like the mean old curmudgeon that he was.

And now Hammy must set to work and tidy it up; and oh! what lots of nice
manure was floating about, all for nothing the cartload ... And so the
primeval family felt better, and went back to the ark to tea, feeling
almost cheerful, but rather lonesome.

Fortunately this great flood did little injury to life or limb. A certain
amount of destruction of crops and other property was inevitable, but on
the whole the loss was not so great as was at one time feared, and much
was saved that at first seemed irreparable.

A well-known lady artist came near to giving the note of tragedy to the
British community, and losing the number of her mess (to use a nautical,
and therefore appropriate expression) by reason of a big willow tree,
beneath whose shady boughs she had moored her floating studio. This
hapless tree, having all its sustenance swept from beneath by the greedy
water, came down with a crash in the night upon the confiding house-boat,
and all but swamped it.

The cook-boat, occupied as usual by a pair of prolific Mangis and their
large small family, was saved by the proverbial "acid drop"--the children
crawling out somehow or anyhow from among the branches of the fallen tree.

The fair artist, having with shrieks invoked the aid of a neighbour, he
promptly descended from his roof or other temporary camp, and helped her
with basins and chatties to bale out the half-swamped boat. The lady is
now safely moored to the mudbank on the other side of the river w