He tied it up without a word to me, but he spoke to the dog. "Good
morning, Peter," he said. "It's nice weather--for fishes, ain't it?"

He picked out a bit of floating wood from the water, and showing it to
the dog, flung it into the parlor. Peter went after it with a splash.
He was pretty fat, and when he came back I heard him wheezing. But
what he brought back was not the stick of wood. It was the knife I
use for cutting bread. It had been on a shelf in the room where I had
slept the night before, and now Peter brought it out of the flood
where its wooden handle had kept it afloat. The blade was broken off
short.

It is not unusual to find one's household goods floating around during
flood-time. More than once I've lost a chair or two, and seen it after
the water had gone down, new scrubbed and painted, in Molly Maguire's
kitchen next door. And perhaps now and then a bit of luck would come
to me--a dog kennel or a chicken-house, or a kitchen table, or even,
as happened once, a month-old baby in a wooden cradle, that lodged
against my back fence, and had come forty miles, as it turned out,
with no worse mishap than a cold in its head.

But the knife was different. I had put it on the mantel over the stove
I was using up-stairs the night before, and hadn't touched it since.
As I sat staring at it, Terry took it from Peter and handed it to me.

"Better give me a penny, Mrs. Pitman," he said in his impudent Irish
way. "I hate to give you a knife. It may cut our friendship."

I reached over to hit him a clout on the head, but I did not. The
sunlight was coming in through the window at the top of the stairs,