The horror-stricken Terry thought no more about his wife, whom he was in the act of lifting through the trap-door, but let go her hand, allowing her to drop with a crash that shook the whole building.  
“Where is the child?” he asked, facing the elder daughter.
 
“Yonder; I was trying to hold her when she slipped away and rolled down the slope of the roof—”
 
But the father waited to hear no more. Just then the cry of his baby reached his ear, and he caught a glimpse of the white clothing which helped to her up. Like an athlete, running along a spring-board to gather for his tremendous leap, he took a couple of steps down the incline of the roof to the edge, from which he made a tremendous bound far out in the muddy .
 
It was the energy of desperation and the of affection itself which carried him for a long way over the water, so that when he struck, one extended arm seized the shoulder of his child, while the other sustained both from sinking.
 
Poor Katie, who had been for breath, now began crying, and the sound was welcome to the parent, for it proved that she was alive. Had she been quiet he would have believed she was drowned.
 
The trees which grew so thickly in the little valley served another good purpose in addition to that already named. The most powerful swimmer that ever lived could not make headway against such a torrent, nor indeed hold his own for a moment.
 
Terry would have been quickly swept beyond sight and sound of the rest of his family had he not grasped a strong, limb by which he checked his progress.
 
“Are ye there, Terry?”
 
It was his wife who called. She had heard the cry of the elder girl at the moment she went downward herself with such a crash. She was as as her husband, and did that which would have been impossible at any other time. Grasping the sides of the trap-door, she drew herself upward and through with as much as her husband a few minutes before. She asked the question at the moment her head and shoulders appeared above the roof.
 
“Yis, I’m here, Delia,” he called back, “and Katie is wid me.”
 
“Hiven be praised!” was the response of the wife; “I don’t care now if the owld is knocked into smithereens.”
 
The speech was of an Irishwoman, who never thought of her own fate in case the named should overtake her while she was on the roof. She could dimly discern the figures of her husband and child, as the former clung to the friendly limb.
 
“If yer faat are risting so gintaaly on the ground,” said the wife, who supposed for the moment he was on the earth and grasping the branch to steady himself, “why doesn’t ye walk forward and jine us?”
 
“If my faat are risting on the ground!” repeated Terry: “and if I were doing the same, I would be as tall as a maating-house wid the staaple thrown in.”
 
“Thin would ye loike to have us join ye?” persisted the wife.
 
“Arrah, Delia, now are ye gone clean crazy, that ye talks in that style? Stay where ye be, and I would be thankful if I could get back to ye, which the same I can’t do.”
 
The wife had been so that her questions were a little mixed, but by the time she was fairly seated on the roof, with one arm encircling Maggie, who clung, frightened and crying, to her, she began to realize her situation.
 
“Terry,” she called again, “are ye not comfortable?”
 
“Wal, yis,” replied the fellow, whose waggery must show itself, now that he believed the entire family were safe from the flood, “I faals as comfortable, thank ye, as if I was standing on me head on the top of a barber’s pole. How is it wid yerself, me jewel?”
 
“I’m thankful for the blissing of our lives; but why don’t ye climb into the traa and take a seat?”
 
“I will do so in a few minutes.”
 
There was good ground for this promise. Although Terry had been sustaining himself only a brief while, he felt the water rising so rapidly that the crown of h............