for the
lower doors and windows had been removed to prevent their being driven
in or out, as the case might be.

So complete was the destruction everywhere, that Samuel Ravenshaw had
passed into a gleeful state of recklessness, and appeared to enjoy the
fun of thus roughing it rather than otherwise, to the amusement of his
amiable wife, who beheld his wasteful and daring culinary efforts
without a murmur, and to the horror of Miss Trim, who was called upon to
assist in and share the triumphs as well as the dangers of these
efforts.

"Fetch the pepper now, Miss Trim. That's it, thank 'ee.--Hallo! I say,
the top has come off that rascally thing, and half the contents have
gone into the pan!"

He was engaged in frying a mess of pemmican and flour, of which
provender he had secured enough to stand a siege of at least six months'
duration.

"Never mind," he continued; "in with more flour and more pemmican.
That's your sort. It'll make it taste more like curry, which is hot
enough, in all conscience."

"But pepper is not like curry," said Miss Trim, who had a brother in
India, and was consequently a secondhand authority on Indian affairs.
"Curry is hot, no doubt, and what one may call a seasoning; but it has
not the flavour of pepper at all, and is not the colour of it, and--"

"Yes, yes, _I_ know all about that, Miss Trim. Why, there's a box of
it, isn't there, in the little cupboard on the stair? I quite forgot
it. Fetch it, please, and we'll have real pemmican curry; and rouse up
my lazy girls as you pass. Don't disturb Mrs R, though. The proverb
says, `Let sleeping'--no, I don't mean _that_ exactly. By the way,
don't slip on the stair. The water's about up to that cupboard. Mind,
there are six feet water or more in the passage now, and if--"

He stopped, for Miss Trim had already left the room, just as Lambert
entered it.

The cupboard to which Miss Trim had been sent was an angular one, let
into the wall to utilise a crooked corner. The step of the stair
immediately below it was the last dry one of the flight. From that step
to the bottom was held by the flood, which gurgled oilily through the
deserted basement. Descending to that step with caution, and gazing
anxiously at her own image reflected below, she opened the cupboard
door.

Now, it chanced that Angus Macdonald's Cochin-China hen, having been
driven from its own home by the flood, had strayed into Mr Ravenshaw's
house and established i