d, leaving farm after
farm behind it, until it reached the village.

"The dam is breaking! Run for your lives!" cried Bonnyboy, with a
rousing clarion yell which rose above all other poises; and up and down
the valley the dread tidings spread like wildfire. In an instant all was
in wildest commotion. Terrified mothers, with babes in their arms, came
bursting out of the houses, and little girls, hugging kittens or
cages with canary-birds, clung weeping to their skirts; shouting men,
shrieking women, crying children, barking dogs, gusty showers sweeping
from nowhere down upon the distracted fugitives, and above all the
ominous, throbbing, pulsating roar as of a mighty chorus of cataracts.
It came nearer and nearer. It filled the great vault of the sky with a
rush as of colossal wing-beats. Then there came a deafening creaking
and crashing; then a huge brownish-white rolling wall, upon which the
moonlight gleamed for an instant, and then the very trump of doom--a
writhing, brawling, weltering chaos of cattle, dogs, men, lumber,
houses, barns, whirling and struggling upon the destroying flood.

VI.

It was the morning after the disaster. The sun rose red and threatening,
circled with a ring of fiery mist. People encamped upon the hill-side
greeted each other as on the morn of resurrection. For many were found
among the living who were being mourned as dead. Mothers hugged their
children with tearful joy, thanking God that they had been spared; and
husbands who had heard through the night the agonized cries of their
drowning wives, finding them at dawn safe and sound, felt as if they had
recovered them from the very gates of death. When all were counted, it
was ascertained that but very few of the villagers had been overtaken by
the flood. The timely warning had enabled all to save themselves, except
some who in their eagerness to rescue their goods had lingered too long.
Impoverished most of them were by the loss of their houses and cattle.
The calamity was indeed overwhelming. But when they considered how much
greater the disaster would have been if the flood had come upon them
unheralded, they felt that they had cause for gratitude in the midst of
their sorrow. And who was it that brought the tidings that snatched them
from the jaws of death? Well, nobody knew. He rode too fast. And each
was too much startled by the message to take note of the messenger. But
who could he possibly have been? An angel from Heaven, p