Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 2, 2025
It seemed ages before John Ellison and George Warren emerged from the mill. They had encountered Colonel Witham there, just as they had gathered up a long coil of light rope. He, anxious for the fate of his mill in the impending freshet, had not heard the cries farther up shore, and knew nothing of what was going on.
A freshet in the rivers is the rush of waters occasioned by melting snow and ice. The first freshets take down the winter waters of the nearer lakes and rivers. Then the streams become for a time navigable, and the rafts go down. After that comes the second freshet, occasioned by the melting of far-off snow and ice up in the great northern lakes, which are little known.
At first slowly, then more rapidly, the very forefront of the center melted inward and forward and downward until it caught the fierce rush of the freshet and shot out from under the jam. Far up-stream, bristling and formidable, the tons of logs, grinding savagely together, swept forward. The six men and Bryan Moloney who, it will be remembered, were on top worked until the last moment.
Then, when long light lines of rippling water showed in the misty screen we knew that they were nothing but the wakes of swimming muskrats; and soon we glided into a colony of them; but for the time being they were not at home the still-rising spring freshet had driven them from their flooded houses.
And so, by his forethought, Ahmeek had saved the whole colony from destruction. The summer was uneventful, but the winter following the great freshet came near being a disastrous one for the thriving colony. Two half-breed trappers on their way north for furs came upon the pond. As they noted the number and size of the lodges dotting the surface, their eyes shone.
Were they swept into eternity by a freshet? Did they lose their provisions and starve in the desert? Did the Indians revenge themselves for brutality and selfishness by slaying them at night or from an ambush? Were they killed by banditti? Did they sink in the quicksands that led the river into subterranean canals?
Farther down is a sandy hollow which was deep under water in the great January freshet. That freshet deposited a new layer of sand and also bushels of clam and snail shells of all sizes and species. They lie so thick they may be taken up by the shovelful. Two or three dead fish are also found. What a fine fossiliferous stratum will be found here about a hundred million years from now!
There they remain until the break-up attendant on spring shall flood the stream to a freshet. The rollways are then broken, and the saw logs floated down the river to the mill where they are to be cut into lumber. If for any reason this transportation by water is delayed until the flood goes down, the logs are stranded or left in pools.
These in the shape of numerous little streamlets, flowing into the river, most of them still in freshet from the late rain. One after another they ford them, none being so deep as to call for swimming.
Jeffords says there will be a freshet. The roads will be all torn up. We shall never be able to get home." "O yes, we shall," said Sylvie, cheerily; putting down the wonder that arose obtrusively in her own mind as to where the home would be that they should go to. "Did Mrs. Jeffords tell you about last year's freshet? And the apples?" "She said they had an awful flood.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking