dropped from her like a garment, and her trembling ceased. It was then
and thereafter that she never lost her self-command, through all the
trials of that gloomy night.

She drew the bedstead toward the middle of the room, and placed a table
upon it and on that she put the cradle. The water on the floor
was already over her ankles, and the house once or twice moved so
perceptibly, and seemed to be racked so, that the closet doors all flew
open. Then she heard the same rasping and thumping against the wall,
and, looking out, saw that a large uprooted tree, which had lain near
the road at the upper end of the pasture, had floated down to the house.
Luckily its long roots dragged in the soil and kept it from moving as
rapidly as the current, for had it struck the house in its full career,
even the strong nails and bolts in the piles could not have withstood
the shock. The hound had leaped upon its knotty surface, and crouched
near the roots shivering and whining. A ray of hope flashed across her
mind. She drew a heavy blanket from the bed, and, wrapping it about
the babe, waded in the deepening waters to the door. As the tree swung
again, broadside on, making the little cabin creak and tremble, she
leaped on to its trunk. By God's mercy she succeeded in obtaining a
footing on its slippery surface, and, twining an arm about its roots,
she held in the other her moaning child. Then something cracked near the
front porch, and the whole front of the house she had just quitted fell
forward--just as cattle fall on their knees before they lie down--and at
the same moment the great redwood tree swung round and drifted away with
its living cargo into the black night.

For all the excitement and danger, for all her soothing of her crying
babe, for all the whistling of the wind, for all the uncertainty of
her situation, she still turned to look at the deserted and water-swept