was water-logged, and could scarcely keep his own poor head from
drowning, and he turned his mild eyes and looked at me, but I could not
spare him. He struck for the shore in forlorn hope, and he towed us in
some little.

It is no good for me to pretend to say how things were managed for us,
for of course I could do nothing. But the sheep must have piloted us to
a tree, whose branches swept the torrent. Here I let him go, and caught
fast hold; and Uncle Sam's raft must have stuck there also, for what
could my weak arm have done? I remember only to have felt the ground at
last, as the flood was exhausted; and good people came and found him and
me, stretched side by side, upon rubbish and mud.

CHAPTER X

A NUGGET

In a sacred corner (as soon as ever we could attend to any thing) we
hung up the leathern bag of tools, which had done much more toward
saving the life of Uncle Sam than I did; for this had served as a kind
of kedge, or drag, upon his little craft, retarding it from the great
roll of billows, in which he must have been drowned outright. And even
as it was, he took some days before he was like himself again.

Firm, who had been at the head of the valley, repairing some broken
hurdles, declared that a water-spout had burst in the bosom of the
mountain gorge where the Blue River has its origin, and the whole of its
power got ponded back by a dam, which the Sawyer himself had made, at
about five furlongs above the mill. Ephraim, being further up the gulch,
and high above the roaring flood, did his utmost with the keen edge of
his eyes to pierce into the mischief; but it rained so hard, and at the
same time blew so violently around him, that he could see nothing of
what went on, but hoped for the best, with uneasiness.

Now when the Sawyer came round so well as to have a clear mind of
things, and learn that his mill was gone and his business lost, and
himself, at this ripe time of life, almost driven to begin the world
again, it was natural to expect that he ought to indulge in a good deal
of grumbling. Many people came to comfort him, and to offer him deep
condolence and the truest of true sympathy, and every thing that could
be thought of, unless it were a loan of money. Of that they never
thought, because it was such a trifling matter; and they all had
confidence in his power to do any thing but pay them. They told him that
he was a young man still, and Providence watched over him; in a year or
two h