cy!"

For all that one could see through the windows was a great black sheet of
driving rain, and the roar of the storm was terrible. The Ark shook. It
seemed, at each successive blast, as though the walls would fall in over
our heads. One could easily imagine the whole crazy structure borne
onward before the resistless tempest, to take a final wild leap from the
cliffs.

"Wallencamp's a gittin' all mixed up," said Grandpa, without the faintest
tinge of humor, now. "We sha'n't know where to find ourselves when we git
out o' this 'ere, ef we ever do git out on't. Lord ha' mercy!"

Madeline sat very white and still, resting her chin on her hands, her
great eyes staring out.

Grandma held the two frightened children in her lap. She was rocking and
singing to them in a low, crooning tone. Though she was pale and her lips
trembled, there was still about her a soothing atmosphere of peace.

I was frightened, like the children. I longed to cry out as they had
done; to bury my head away from the terrors somewhere, as they did in
Grandma's lap.

"That was the blackest squall," said Grandpa Keeler, afterwards; "that
ever swep' across the Cape!"

Terrible as it had been, it died quickly. The transition seemed
miraculous from the sullen roar of the wind and torrent-fall of rain, to
the renewed chirping of the birds, the quiet dripping of the eaves, and
sunshine over all.

But the young peach-tree that had stood by the window of the Ark, and
sent its fragrance into my little room above, lay prone upon the ground.
When she saw that, Grandma Keeler moaned heart-brokenly, as though it had
been some fair human life stripped suddenly of its promise and left to
wither fruitlessly.

There were traces of the storm everywhere. Trees that had stood isolated
in the fields lay, some of them, with roots exposed; others were broken
off at the trunk, left with only a branch or two, helpless figures with
outstretched arms, to give a weird desolation to the landscape by and by,
I thought with a shudder, when winter should come again to Wallencamp.

The fences--what remained of them from former depredations--had either
fallen utterly to the ground, or assumed a strikingly precarious
position.

Part of the roof of Mr. Randal's house had been blown off, and the
chimneys of several of the Wallencamp houses demolished, and Grandpa's
barn twisted and distorted almost beyond recognition.

That poor old gentleman put on his hat and stepped ou