The Week After that Flood.
This started John W. Alexander, the Lynnville druggist and horseman, and the present owner of Brown Hal, Jr., He had been eating a currant pie and stopped long enough to say: “My flood yarn is the greatest thing that I ever heard of. An old man—a good, honest, but poor farmer—has been tilling a hillside field three miles above Lynnville for years. The week after that flood, while plowing in the hillside, suddenly, without any warning, his team and plow disappeared in the furrow ahead of him. The man stopped and found that he stood on the brink of a hole that had suddenly opened in the earth and taken his team in. Peering down he saw his poor horses, piled on one another fully twenty feet below. They were groaning and calling pitifully for him to help them, but in a half hour their groans ceased and they were dead. The explanation is simple: The heavy rains had cut out a sink hole in a few feet of the surface, which broke under the weight of the team. We raised, by public subscription, enough money to buy him another team.”
By this time, Geo. Campbell Brown, of Ewell Farm, had eaten the other pie. “Do you all know old man Simpson, of Richland Creek?” he asked innocently. We all knew him.
“Well, you know, he was drowned in that flood while trying to drive some colts out of the bottom lands before the water was too high. His wife told him not to go into that swamp, but you never heard of a man taking his wife’s advice when it comes to horses, so he was drowned, and went on to a better land. He hadn’t more than arrived before he was telling it to listening crowds what a terrible flood they had in Tennessee and how old Richland Creek spread all over the state of Giles. Finally he went on and told about Pat Connolly and the snake, the jackass tale, and the Indian graveyard and all that, and closed by telling that Richland Creek was twenty feet higher than the high-water mark of 1834, registered on the old elm at Possum Bend School House. When he said this he noticed an old, gray-headed man turn up his nose disdainfully and walk off without saying a word.
“‘Why, that old man seems offended,’ said Simpson—‘who is he?’
“‘Why, don’t you know him?’ said a listener—‘that’s Noah!’”
“I think it is time for the squirrels to begin to come out again,” I said, as I picked up my gun and started into the woods.
TROTWOOD.