As day fades into night the monotony of this strange prospect grows oppressive. I seek the engine-room, and in the company of some of the few half-drowned sufferers we have already picked up from temporary rafts, I forget the general aspect of desolation in their individual misery. Later we meet the San Francisco packet, and transfer a number of our passengers. From them we learn how inward-bound vessels report to having struck the well-defined channel of the Sacramento fifty miles beyond the bar. There is a voluntary contribution taken among the generous travelers for the use of our afflicted, and we part company with a hearty “God speed” on either side. But our signal lights are not far distant before a familiar sound comes back to us,—an indomitable Yankee cheer,—which scatters the gloom. Our course is altered, and we are steaming over the obliterated banks far in the interior. Once or twice black objects loom up near us,—the wrecks of houses floating by. There is a slight rift in the sky towards the north, and a few bearing stars to guide us over the waste. As we penetrate into shallower water, it is deemed advisable to divide our party into smaller boats, and diverge over the submerged prairie. I borrow a pea-coat of one of the crew, and in that practical disguise am doubtfully permitted to pass into one of the boats. We give way northerly. It is quite dark yet, although the rift of cloud has widened. It must have been about three o’clock, and we were lying upon our oars in an eddy formed by a clump of cottonwood, and the light of the steamer is a solitary bright star in the distance, when the silence is broken by the “bow oar”:— “Light ahead.” All eyes are turned in that direction. In a few seconds a twinkling light appears, shines steadily, and again disappears, as if by the shifting position of some black object apparently drifting close upon us. “Stern, all!—a steamer!” “Hold hard, there! Steamer be d——d!” is the reply of the coxswain. “It’s a house, and a big one too.” It is a big one, looming in the starlight like a huge fragment of the darkness. The light comes from a single candle which shines through a window as the great shape swings by. Some recollection is drifting back to me with it, as I listen with beating heart. “There’s some one in it, by heavens! Give way, boys,—lay her alongside. Handsomely, now! The door’s fastened; try the window; no! here’s another!” In another moment we are trampling in the water, which washes the floor to the depth of several inches. It is a large room, at the farther end of which an old man is sitting, wrapped in a blanket, holding a candle in one hand, and apparently absorbed in the book he holds with the other. I spring toward him with an exclamation:— “Joseph Tryan!” He does not move. We gather closer to him, and I lay my hand gently on his shoulder, and say,— “Look up, old man, look up! Your wife and children, where are they? The boys,—George! Are they here? are they safe?”