The Safety First Club and the Flood

BY W. T. NICHOLS
Author of “The Safety First Club”
Illustrated by F. A. Anderson
THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY PHILADELPHIA 1917
COPYRIGHT 1917 BY THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY
The Safety First Club and the Flood.
The one school which never needs a truant officer is the School of Experience. Whether we like it or not, we have to go to this school, all of us; but whether we shall profit by its lessons or waste the instruction is wholly a matter of our own choice. In this story Sam Parker and his friends, some of whose experiences have been earlier set forth in the first volume of this series, “The Safety First Club,” take a new course, so to speak, with resultant profit to themselves. “The Safety First Club and the Flood” finds this group of boys, and especially its leader, Sam, worried, beset and tried by problems new to them, perplexing, baffling; not very grave problems, at first glance, but serious enough in the eyes of the boys and not unimportant in their consequences—a phase of life, in short, which has very direct concern to young or old.
Sam learns his lesson; his mates learn theirs. Incidentally, they undergo trials of the flesh and of the spirit, and are the better for both. They meet adventure which, it is hoped, will be found to the taste of the friends the chums have made and may make through this volume and those which are to follow it.
The Safety First Club and the Flood
It was not a cheerful afternoon. Overhead were heavy, gray clouds, and underfoot was snow, long fallen, crusted by alternate thawing and freezing, dingy with the queer winter dust, which comes from nobody knows exactly where. In the beaten track of the roadways was an icy surface, made still more slippery by a thin coating, at once grimy and greasy, offering easy traction for the sledges, piled high with wood, which now and then came crunching along the streets. But it was full of peril to the motor cars, a few of which were abroad, skidding wildly at corners in spite of chained tires and careful driving. Out in the fields the snow was perhaps a foot deep. Where paths had been shoveled the long mounds beside the walks rose almost to the waist of a man of average height. Altogether, it was a typical February scene in Plainville, a town well to the north, accustomed to hard winters and making the best of one of them, scarcely enjoying the experience but accepting it as inevitable.