The blind downpour being gone, though rain still fell and the wind whistled in his ears, Jean climbed across bent or broken saplings nearer the bluff’s edge to look at Kaskaskia.  The rows of lights were partially blotted; and lightning, by its swift unrollings, showed him a town standing in a lake.  The Mississippi and the Okaw had become one water, spreading as far as the eye could see.  Now bells began to clamor from that valley of foam.  The bell of the Immaculate Conception, cast in France a hundred years before, which had tolled for D’Artaguette, and made jubilee over weddings and christenings, and almost lived the life of the people, sent out the alarm cry of smitten metal; and a tinkling appeal from the convent supplemented it.

There was no need of the bells to rouse Kaskaskia; they served rather as sounding buoys in a suddenly created waterway.  Peggy Morrison had come to stay all night with Angelique Saucier.  The two girls were shut in their bedroom, and Angelique’s black maid was taking the pins from Peggy’s hair, when the stone house received its shock, and shuddered like a ship.  Screams were heard from the cabins.  Angelique threw the sashes open, and looked into storm and darkness; yet the lightning showed her a driving current of water combed by pickets of the garden fence.  It washed over the log steps, down which some of her father’s slaves were plunging from their doors, to recoil and scramble and mix their despairing cries with the wakening clamor of bells.

Their master shouted encouragement to them from the back gallery.  Angelique’s candles were blown out by the wind when she and Peggy tried to hold them for her father.  The terrified maid crouched down in a helpless bunch on the hall floor, and Madame Saucier herself brought the lantern from the attic.  The perforated tin beacon, spreading its bits of light like a circular shower of silver on the gallery floor, was held high for the struggling slaves.  Heads as grotesque as the waterspouts on old cathedrals craned through the darkness and up to the gallery posts.  The men breasted the deepening water first, and howling little blacks rode on their fathers’ shoulders.  Captain Saucier pulled the trembling creatures in, standing waist-deep at the foot of the steps.  The shrieking women balanced light bundles of dry clothes on their heads, and the cook brought useless kettles and pans, not realizing that all the food of the house was lost in a water-filled cellar.

The entire white-eyed colony were landed, but scarcely before it was time to close the doors of the ark.  A far-off roar and a swell like that of the ocean came across the submerged country.  No slave had a chance to stand whimpering and dripping in the hall.  Captain Saucier put up the bars, and started a black line of men and women, with pieces of furniture, loads of clothing and linen, bedding and pewter and silver, and precious baskets of china, or tiers of books, upon their heads, up the attic stairs.  Angelique’s