"The crime of doing nothing; of wasting myself. You know what fine speeches I used to make in college about effort, setting the standard high, and all that sort of thing, and how pat at my tongue's end I always had 'per angusta ad augusta' (I'm in a way to realize one part of it now, I think); and as long as I was neck and neck with you and Hill, I did do somewhat; but after I came home, I just fell right back into the old ruts; could not make up my mind in regard to a profession; didn't really want to. I was too comfortable; but I felt mean, felt guilty. When I went to Portland, and heard you argue that case, and saw how much labor it had cost you, and how nobly you came out of it, I felt meaner still, and was half inclined to return without seeing you, and resolved when I got home I would go to work; but I took it out in thinking so, till the trouble came like a flash of lightning; since then, I trust, I've done something, and been of some little use."
"Was it, then, so sudden? I knew that your father's difficulties came in consequence of his lumber and mills being carried away; but even a freshet gives some warning."
"None of us knew that father had every dollar invested in logs that were like to go down stream. He and uncle were anxious enough, but kept it to themselves; and the very night it came, when every man about the mills was out in the pouring rain watching for trouble, I was fooling—reciting a poem that I was going to deliver to a company of our young folks; and I'm ashamed to say, that what I am now going to tell you I had from Henry Alden, one of the men who was where I ought to have been, with my father at the time. You see that smooth, perpendicular ledge that makes out into the river?"
"Yes,"
"And that stake driven into a crack in the ledge?"
"Yes."
"When the water is up to that stake it is freshet pitch. All the morning and afternoon the water had been rising; in the evening, it was the same till it reached a fearful height, when one of the mills went. My father and Uncle Robert stood under that ledge with a lantern, watching the marks they had made on it with chalk. The rain had stopped, and for the last hour the water had not risen, the clouds had broken away overhead, and the stars came out. Every one of the men (all old river-drivers) thought the danger was over. 'Robert,' said my father, 'I think the booms will hold; the rain is over, and the river will soon fall.' The words were scarcely out of his mouth before there was a great cry from the bank above that the logs were coming. Henry said father turned pale, but never opened his mouth, or turned to look, but went straight home. When I came to the breakfast table the next morning, father was sitting there, a little paler than usual, but just as calm as ever, and told us what had taken place. You see now how sudden it must have been to me, mother, and the girls, and almost as much so to him, for he thought the crisis had passed."
"Why didn't the boom break before? and how came it to break after the water was done rising?"
"About two miles above this place is a large intervale, where a great quantity of hay is cut. Upon this flat stood a large barn, with no cattle in it, used for storing hay; half a mile below this was a toll-bridge. The water undermined the barn, and started it from its foundations, and down it came against the bridge with an awful crash. The toll-house stood on piles outside of the bridge. It struck the bridge within ten feet of the house, in which the toll-keeper, his wife, and three children, one a babe in arms, were sound asleep, they supposing, as did my father, that the danger was over. Awakened by the shock, and thinking, in their fright, the house was going, they ran out on to the bridge, the mother with the babe in her arms, all in their night clothes, and were swept off, with about twenty-five feet of the bridge. If they had staid in the house they would have been all right, for there it remained on its own foundation. The barn, bridge, a parcel of fences and drift stuff, all came down into our upper boom together, broke that and then the lower one. One mill had gone before. This vast mass, borne on the raging torrent, carried away another, half the grist mill, and a carding mill."