“A bad spell o’ weather, sir,” he said, loquaciously, to the occupant of the car who had his eyes open. “Uncommon rainy for Florida; been fallin’ stiddy for two days and nights. ’Counts for the few passengers, I ’spose. Well, ’tis er ill wind blows nobody good. Better sleepin’ ’commodations for the passengers,” glancing around humorously; for this was twenty years ago, reader, and before the luxurious era of Pullman sleepers and parlor cars and fast-flying vestibule trains. Norman de Vere was about to make some brief, courteous answer to the man’s remarks, but he was prevented by a sudden terrible rumble and rocking of the car--the swift precursor of one of those dreadful railway accidents due to heavy rains and weakened bridge foundations that desolate so many hearts and homes. With a swift instinct he clasped his sleeping burden tightly to his breast just as the doomed car reared upward a moment, like a maddened, living creature, only to collapse the next instant with its freight of human souls and go crashing down through a broken bridge into a mad hell of seething, foaming water. * * * * * A little river ordinarily insignificant enough, but swollen now to a torrent by incessant rains for several days, had washed all the mortar from the stone foundations of the railroad bridge and weakened it so that the weight of the locomotive had carried it down crashing to the bed of the river and telescoped the train. * * * * * When Norman de Vere realized that, but for a sharp blow on the head from a heavy timber, he was unhurt, and that he held the struggling child safe in his arms, it seemed to him that he must have been saved by a miracle, nothing less. The whole train was a wreck, and but for the fact that the ladies’ car was on top of the _débris_, he could never have escaped alive. He was wedged between two seats of the car, which lay on its side, the windows uppermost, and over and around surged the raging water, churned into foam by the rapid descent of the train, and by the explosion of the locomotive’s boiler as soon as it touched the river. To add to the horror of the position, the lamps just lighted by the brakeman had exploded and caught fire, affording a lurid light within the interior of the wrecked car. The child in his arms waked and screamed with sudden terror. He hushed her with a tender word, and listened appalled for another human sound in that terrible tumult of crashing timbers and raging waters. But no sound came. He saw the brakeman’s legs sticking out from under a pile of timbers that had instantaneously crushed the life from his body. Turning about in his cramped position, he looked for Sweetheart’s mother and the drummers. There was no sign of the slender little black-draped figure, but a pair of masculine arms protruded from under an overturned seat. He put Sweetheart down and went to work manfully to extricate the owner.