had a chance of that which would have set me straight.”

"Your wife, you scoundrel! You stole her from me once; now come and take her from me again. Why didn't you save her? She was near to you. You let her die: she lives by me, and for me, and I for her." With this he kissed her again, and held her to his bosom. "D'ye see that?--liar! coward! villain!"

Even across that tremendous body of rushing death, from which neither was really safe, both rivals' eyes gleamed hate at each other.

The wild beasts that a flood drives together on to some little eminence, lay down their natures, and the panther crouches and whimpers beside the antelope; but these were men, and could entertain the fiercest of human passions in the very jaws of death.

To be sure it was but for a moment; a new danger soon brought them both to their senses; an elm-tree whirling past grazed Coventry's plane-tree; it was but a graze, yet it nearly shook him off into the flood, and he yelled with fear: almost at the same moment a higher wave swept into Little's room, and the rising water set every thing awash, and burst over him as he kneeled with grace. He got up, drenched and half-blinded with the turbid water, and, taking Grace in his arms, waded waist-high to his bed, and laid her down on it.

It was a moment of despair. Death had entered that chamber in a new, unforeseen, and inevitable form. The ceiling was low, the water was rising steadily; the bedstead floated; his chest of drawers floated, though his rifle and pistols lay on it, and the top drawers were full of the tools he always had about him: in a few minutes the rising water must inevitably jam Grace and him against the ceiling, and drown them like rats in a hole.

Fearful as the situation was, a sickening horror was added to it by the horrible smell of the water; it had a foul and appalling odor, a compound of earthiness and putrescence; it smelt like a newly-opened grave; it paralyzed like a serpent's breath.

Stout as young Little's heart was, it fainted now when he saw his bedstead, and his drawers, and his chairs, all slowly rising toward the ceiling, lifted by that cold, putrescent, liquid death.

But all men, and even animals, possess greater powers of mind, as well as of body, than they ever exert, unless compelled by dire necessity: and it would have been strange indeed if a heart so stanch, and a brain so inventive, as Little's, had let his darling die like a rat drowned in a hole, without some new and masterly attempt first made to save her.