“Gi’t up, sir.  ’Tis mortally impossible.”  As well as Mavis, every one of them shouted an entreaty that he would come down.

Probably he did not hear them, and certainly he did not obey them.  He went up, not down.  Then for half an hour he fought like a madman with the flapping sheet, and finally conquered it.

Mavis, as she stared upward, saw the gray clouds driving so fast over the crest of the stack that they made it seem as if the whole yard was drifting away in the opposite direction; while her man, a poor little black insect painfully crawling here and there, desperately writhed as new billows surged up beneath him, labored at the rope, seemed to use feet, hands, and teeth in his frantic efforts against the overwhelming power that was opposed to him.  She felt dazed and giddy, sick with fear, and yet glowing with admiration in the midst of her agonized anxiety.

To the men it was a wonderful and exciting sight that had altogether stirred them from their usual turnip-like lethargy.  When the master came down, all shaking and bleeding, they bellowed hearty compliments in his ear.

“Now,” said the old charwoman, when Mr. and Mrs. Dale returned to the kitchen, “you’ve a ‘aad a nice skimmle-skammle of it, sir, an’ you best back me up to send the missis to her bed, and bide there warm, and never budge.  I means it,” she added, with authority.  “You ben’t to put yourself in a caddle, Mrs. Dale, an’ I know what I be talkin’ of.”

After this the men appeared to work better for Dale; perhaps still somewhat sulkily whenever he pressed them, continuing to be more or less afraid of him, but not so keenly regretting the loss of their white-haired old master.

The storm had brought back the floods, and they were now worse than anything that anybody remembered having ever seen.  The feeding sources of the Rod River had broken all bounds; the lower parts of Hadleigh Wood had become a quagmire; and the volume of water passing under the road bridge was so great that many people thought this ancient structure to be in danger of collapsing.  Over at Otterford Mill, the stream swept like a torrent through a chain of wide lakes; Mr. Bates’ cottage was cut off from the highroad, and the meadows behind the neighboring Foxhound Kennels were deep under water.

In these days Dale took to riding as the easiest means of getting about; and one afternoon when he had gone splashing across to see Mr. Bates, thence to pay a visit of polite canvass at the Kennels, and was now returning homeward by the lanes, he heard a dismal chorus of cries in the Mill meads.

Forcing his clumsy horse through a gap in the hedge, he galloped along the sodden field tracks to the shifting scene of commotion.  Three or four idle louts, a couple of children, and a farm-laborer were running by the swollen margin of the mill-stream, yelling forlornly, pointing at an object that showed itself now and again in the swirling center of the current.  Plainly, somebody had chosen this most unpropitious season for an accidental bath, and his companions were sympathetically watching him drown, while not daring, not dreaming of, any foolhardy attempt at a rescue.