Three days after Abel Edwards’s return came one of the severest rain-storms ever known in Upham.  The storm began before light; when people first looked out in the morning their windows were glazed with streaming wet, but it did not reach its full fury until eleven o’clock.  Then the rain fell in green and hissing sheets.

“Gorry,” Martin Cheeseman said, looking out of the mill door, which seemed to open into a solid wall of water, “looks as if the great deep was turned upsidedown overhead.  If it keeps on this way long there’ll be mischief.”

“Think there’ll be danger to the mill?” Jerome asked, quickly.

“No, I guess not, it’s built strong; but I wouldn’t resk the solid airth long under Niagry.  Where you goin’?”

“Down to Robinson’s store.  I want to get something.”

“Well, I should think you were half-witted to go out in this soak if you could keep a roof over your head,” cried Cheeseman, but Jerome was gone.

He bought strong rope at Robinson’s store, and before night the mill was anchored to some stout trees and one great granite bowlder.  Cheeseman helped grumblingly.  “I shall get laid up with rheumatiz out of it,” he said; “an’ this rain can’t keep on, it ain’t in natur’, out of the Old Testament.”

But the rain continued all that day and night, and the next day, with almost unremitting fury.  At times it seemed more than rain—­there were liquid shafts reaching from earth to sky.  By noon of the second day, half the cellars in the village were flooded; coops floated in slatted wrecks over fields; the roads were knee-deep in certain places; the horses drew back—­it was like fording a stream.  People began to be alarmed.

“If this keeps on an hour longer, there’ll be the devil to pay,” Squire Eben Merritt said, when he came home to dinner.  He had been down to Lawyer Means’s and crossed the Graystone brook, which was now a swollen river.

“What will happen?” asked Abigail.

“Happen?  The Main Street bridge will go, and the saw-mill, and the Lord knows what else.”

Lucina turned pale.

“It will be hard on Jerome if he loses his mill,” said her mother.

“Well, the boy will lose it if it keeps on,” returned the Squire.  “He’s working hard, with four men to help him; they’re loading it with stones and anchoring it with ropes, but it can’t stand much more.  I miss my guess, if the foundations are not undermined now.”

Lucina said not a word, but as soon as she could she slipped up-stairs to her chamber and prayed that her Heavenly Father would save poor Jerome’s mill, and stop the rain; but it kept on raining.  When Lucina heard the fierce dash of it on her window-pane, like an angry dissent to her petition, she prayed more fervently, sobbing softly in the whiteness of her maiden bed; still it rained.