But my greatest help was in a flood early in May. The headwaters of the Cumberland lie in the Appalachian range, that great wooded mountain strip which mothers the headwaters of the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland, and so of all the states they water. That long ridge of wooded slope had been a sponge, the gauge that controlled the flow from half the tillable Union. On the Tennessee, the forest had been brutally butchered, and on the Cumberland as badly treated. The flood came. There was but little to hold, and check it, and we had a deluge such as was never known before. Even my grandsire, seeing it, admitted what I said. The seemingly wasted word had fallen as the drift of the elm tree’s shaft had taken root in a corner of the old field. *CHAPTER XIII* *THE UNATTAINABLE* My work took me daily to Tammas’s cottage. There was nothing so restful to me as these two good people, and their sweetness and cheer, and Elsie held my interest. I had always been fond of her, and now that she had grown into this rare, delicate flower, so sensitively turned, so romantically original, I found the greatest pleasure in studying her, and, in humoring her, as everybody did who came into her sphere. She commanded obedience as readily as she gave it. Every day was a different mood, and always a romance with her. One day she had on a large white apron, and was helping Tammas with the churning. "I am playing a new game, to-day, Jack," she said, pulling me to a corner of the dairy where the spring water whirled through the stone troughs. "You’ll laugh when you hear it," she added, her eyes shining into mine. "I’ll not," I said, "I’ll be more apt to play with you. What is the game to-day?" She laughed merrily. "Well, to-day I am a duke’s daughter, who was secretly exchanged in her cradle with the dairyman’s baby. Now only three people know it; the dairyman, who is old, and about to die; and who is so sorry that he ever did it, but he did so want his own daughter to be a lady in the land; and me, whom he has told at the last minute, and the bad, bold knight, very dashing, who has bribed the dairyman to tell him, and who wishes very much to marry me. But I want to marry my own bonny prince, you see." "I should think he’d be proud and loyally love his dairymaid bride," I laughed, pinching her cheek. "But, Jack, you are so stupid," she said, pouting. "You don’t catch on. I can’t play a game by myself. I want you to play the prince." Tammas stood looking on, his face in its favorite Scotch grin. "Weel, weel, did ye ever hear the like o’ that, an’ it’s no’ leap-year either!" I could see that he was pleased and proud. "And it is the prince I’ll play from now on, my ane braw lassie," I said, dropping into her own dialect. "Isn’t that what you call them in Scotch?" I asked.