up the vast pile of water, and slowly, the lanthorn dangling by his side and swaying in the wind, he began to tread the path on the embankment top, slowly for in the uncertain light, a slip might cost him a sousing, and it was no hour for a cold bath. But, as he walked, peering ahead to pierce the gloom, and watching carefully his steps by the lanthorn's pale glimmer, he came, midway in his course, upon a sight that checked him with sudden halt, and made his heart stand still. There, at his very feet the water was trickling over the bank, and down the outside. A thin flow, perhaps, a couple of feet in width, had worn the upper soil, and now a continuous stream, not a quarter of an inch in depth, was gently, silently ebbing over the embankment. Even as Tom gazed spell-bound, he was sensible that the opening widened, the water that overflowed was deeper, and its escape in quicker time. A great fear seized on Tom, a dreadful thought well-nigh crushed his brain. He felt powerless to move. Then, with a cry, he rushed heedless along the embankment to the culvert. Not a drop of water flowed over the culvert's lip. The pent giant had found an outlet for itself, and was making for it. Tom ran back to the gap he had but just left. Even by this faint light he saw the breach was wider, the furrow deeper. Sick at heart, scarce realising what he did, Tom with stick and hand tried to tear up stones, cobbles, or sods that might stem the growing current. He spent his time and in vain. Fast as he made his tiny barrier, the licking wavelets undermined it and washed it gently down the embankment side; and the stream that now, oh! so silently, so grimly wore away the surface layers, bit and gnawed into the vast barrier and the clinging earthwork. But to Tom, with action had come perception. Vivid as lightning's flash the whole sequence of the possible, nay, the seeming inevitable, was borne upon his mind. He sprang to his feet, dashed down the embankment side. Not two hundred yards below the reservoir some houses stood darkling in the night, their inmates locked in sleep. With fist and stick Tom hammered at the door, thrust his stick, his fist through the windows of the bottom room, where oft the turn-up bed was stretched. "Rouse ye, rouse ye!" he cried. "The reservoir! Flee for your lives!" Down to the Co-op Mill he dashed, racing as sure only as those do speed who know that Death follows hard upon their heels, and ever as he sped and passed some silent, lowly cot he paused a breathing space to rend the midnight silence with wild, yet wilder cry, "The flood! The flood! Haste ye, save yourselves." He reached the gates of his own mill, dashed to the corner where Jack still slept in dreamless sleep. He kicked his prostrate form, he shook him, dragged him to his feet. "Don yo'r breeches. Here's yo'r' clogs. Haste, man! Bilberry's brust. Damn yo' wakken. Ar't deead?" In that time of frenzied haste the language of his childhood came back to his lips.