t be no heavy storm when it is like that. Don't you
make pretense, missy, to know what is beyond you."

Uncle Sam was so seldom cross that I always felt that he had a right
to be so. And he gave me one of his noble smiles to make up for the
sharpness of his words, and then back he went to his work again. So I
hoped that I was altogether wrong, till a bolt of lightning, like a blue
dagger, fell at my very feet, and a crash of thunder shook the earth and
stunned me. These opened the sluice of the heavens, and before I could
call out I was drenched with rain. Clinging to a bush, I saw the valley
lashed with cloudy blasts, and a whirling mass of spiral darkness
rushing like a giant toward me. And the hissing and tossing and roaring
mixed whatever was in sight together.

Such terror fell upon me at first that I could not look, and could
scarcely think, but cowered beneath the blaze of lightning as a singed
moth drops and shivers. And a storm of wind struck me from my hold, so
that I fell upon the wet earth. Every moment I expected to be killed,
for I never could be brave in a thunder-storm, and had not been told
much in France of God's protection around me. And the darts of lightning
hissed and crossed like a blue and red web over me. So I laid hold of a
little bent of weed, and twisted it round my dabbled wrist, and tried to
pray to the Virgin, although I had often been told it was vanity.

Then suddenly wiping my eyes, I beheld a thing which entirely changed
me. A vast, broad wall of brown water, nearly as high as the mill
itself, rushed down with a crest of foam from the mountains. It seemed
to fill up all the valley and to swallow up all the trees; a whole host
of animals fled before it, and birds, like a volley of bullets, flew by.
I lost not a moment in running away, and climbing a rock and hiding.
It was base, ungrateful, and a nasty thing to do; but I did it almost
without thinking. And if I had staid to cry out, what good could I have
done--only to be swept away?

Now, as far as I can remember any thing out of so much horror, I must
have peeped over the summit of my rock when the head of the deluge
struck the mill. But whether I saw it, or whether I knew it by any more
summary process, such as outruns the eyes sometimes, is more than I dare
presume to say. Whichever way I learned it, it was thus:

A solid mass of water, much bigger than the mill itself, burst on it,
dashed it to atoms, leaped off with it, and sp