She has done her best to keep the African troubles to herself, but the news has at last come out, and with it the fact that Spain cannot spare a single soldier to go and subdue it. * * * * * The waters of the Mississippi are still rising, and as yet there is no hope of the floods subsiding. Every day news is sent of fresh crevasses formed and of more levees broken. While the city of New Orleans has not yet suffered, there is hourly fear that it will be flooded. The levees are breaking in all directions, and in the near neighborhood of New Orleans fresh breaks are feared, which will send a vast volume of water flowing toward the city. A government report from Tennessee says that nearly eight hundred square miles of territory is covered with water, from three to seven feet deep. What cabins are still standing are filled with people and cattle, crowding the upper floors or huddled together on rafts moored to the houses. In Missouri the levees protecting Davis Island, the home of Jefferson Davis, have given way, and the island is submerged. Davis Island was densely populated, as about twenty-five hundred people lived on it. Help had to be sent for, and steamers and barges came down and rescued the people and the cattle. Telephone and telegraph messages are being hourly received from points along the river, asking for boats to come and save the unfortunate people, who in many cases are clinging to trees and housetops till help comes. Many stories are being told of the way the people are rescued. In some instances the relief steamers will find a whole family perched on the cottage roof, the women and children, half-dead with fright, clinging panic-stricken to the roof, and crying aloud for help. In others the people will not realize the danger they are in, and refuse to be taken off their housetops, insisting that the floods will subside in a short while, and that they need no help. One party of negroes was found seated on the roof of a cottage. The water had risen to the eaves, and the house was in danger of collapsing under the pressure of the angry waters. The negroes, however, were busily engaged in playing cards, and were annoyed at being rescued from their perilous position before their game was finished. The present flood is the worst ever known in the history of the river. In 1862, during the war, there was a great rise of the Mississippi, which destroyed most of the levees along the banks, and from Vicksburg down the whole country was flooded. Since that year the river has never risen as high until the present time, when the high-water mark of 1862 has been reached and passed in both New Orleans and Vicksburg. For twenty-five years after, the people of the Mississippi Valley felt the effects of that great flood, and the worst fears are entertained for the ruin and desolation that the present one will leave in its path.