visited, and oyster-cans, ash-barrels and unsightly kitchen debris brought to light. It was a mighty revolution where the dregs of society were no longer suppressed, but sailed in state on the top wave.

"It is an idle wind which blows no one good," and amid the general destruction the drift-wood was a God-send to the poor people, and they caught enough to supply them with fire-wood for months. Logs, fences, boards and the contents of steamboat woodyards

were swept into the current. On high points of land near the shore were collected piles bristling with ragged stumps and limbs of trees. The great gnarled branches of forest trees sometimes spread over half the river, while timbers lodging among them formed a sort of raft which kept out of the water the most wonderful things—pieces of furniture, and kitchen utensils which shone in the sun like silver.

Cullum's Ripple is a few miles below Cincinnati. Here the deep current sets close to the shore, making a wild kind of whirlpool or eddy that brings drift-wood almost to land; the rippling water makes a sudden turn and scoops out a little cove in the sand. It is a splendid place for fishermen, but quite dangerous for boats.

Not far above Cullum's Ripple is situated the Magan family mansion, or shanty. The river is on one side, and two parallel railroads are on the other. On the top of the bank, and on a level with the railroads, is a piece of land not much longer or wider than a rope-walk, and on this only available scrap the Railroad Company have built a few temporary houses for their workmen. They are all alike, except that a morning-glory grows over Magan's door.

The colony is called Twinrip possibly the short of "Between Strip." (If the name does not mean

that, will some one skilled in digging up language roots, please tell me what it does mean?) The atmosphere around these cabins is as filled with bustling, whistling confusion as a chimney with smoke.

Besides the water highway, on the other side, just a few feet beyond the iron roads, a horse-car track and a turnpike offer additional facilities for locomotion. Birds perch on the numerous telegraph wires amid wrecks of kites and dingy pennons—once kite-tails—nothing hurts them; and below the children of Twinrip appear just as free and safe, and seem to have as much delight in mere living as their feathered friends.

The Magans were a light-hearted Irish family, whose cheerfulness seemed better than eucalyptus or sunflowers to keep off the fever and ague, and who made the most of the little bits of sunshine that came to them. Tim, a strong-armed laborer, was brakeman on the Road. His wife, a hopeful little body, a woman of expedients, was voted by her neighbors the "cheeriest, condolingest" woman in Twinrip.

Good luck, according to her, was always coming to the Magans. It was good luck brought them to America—by good luck Tim became brakeman. It

was good luck that the school for Connor was free of expense, and so convenient.

Her loyalty to her husband rather modified the expression of her views, yet she often expatiated to her eldest on his advantages, beginning, "There's your father, Connor—I hope you'll be as good a man! remember it wasn't the fashion in the ould country to bother over the little black letters—people don't have to read there—but you just mind your books, and some day you may come to be a conductor, and snap a punch of your own."

No doubt Connor made good resolutions, but when he sat by the window in the school-room and looked at the dimpling, sparkling river, so suggestive of fishing, or at the green trees filled with birds, he was not as devoted to literature as a free-born expectant American citizen ought to be. The teacher was somewhat strict, and it may have been in some of her passes with Connor, the "bubblingoverest" of all her youngsters, that she earned the name of a "daisy lammer."

But the boy knew some things by heart that could not be learned at school. To his ear, the steam whistle of each boat spoke its name as plainly as if it could talk. He need not look to tell whether a passing train was on the O. & M. or on the I.C. & L.

He knew the name of every fiery engine, and felt an admiration—a real friendship for the resistless creatures.

To climb a tree was as easy for him as if he were a cat; there were rumors that he had worked himself to the top of the tall flag-staff—which was as smooth as a greased pole—but I will not vouch for their truth. He could swim like a duck, and paddled about on a board in the river till an ill-natured flat-boatman often snarled out that "that youngster would certain be drowned, if he wasn't born to be hanged."

But the delight of Connor's life was to "catch the first wave" from a big steamer. Dennis Maloney was his comrade in this perilous game. They rowed their egg-shell of a boat close to the wheel. Drenched with spray—for a moment they felt the wild excitement of danger. Four alert eyes, four steady hands kept them from being sucked under—then came the triumph of meeting the first wave that left the steamboat, and the extatic rocking motion of the skiff as she rode the other waves in the wake—but to catch the first was the point in the frolic! Connor was known to many of the pilots as an adept in "catching the first wave." Sometimes he was "tipped" by an unlooked for motion of the machinery,

but was as certain as an india-rubber ball to rise to the surface, and a swim to shore was but fun to the young Magan.

In the house, Mother Maggie was happy when little Mike was tied in his chair, and a bar put in the doorway to keep him from crawling into the attractive water, if he should break loose; and when the door was bolted on the railroad side, he was allowed to gaze through the window at the engines smoking and thundering by all day, and fixing each blazing red eye on him at night—an entrancing spectacle to the child. And when the still younger Pat was tucked up in bed sucking a moist rag, with sugar tied up in it, her world was all right, and at rest.

But it would have taken a person of considerable penetration, or as Maggie said one who knew all "the ins and the outs" to see the peculiar good luck of this day. The water was swashing round within a few feet of the door. Some of the workmen had moved their beds to the space between the tracks, which was piled up with kitchen utensils, and looked like a second-hand store.

In these days of devotion to antiques, we hear dealers in such wares say that things are more valuable for being carefully used. This would not apply to Twinrip's relics. The poor shabby furniture looked

more than ever dilapidated in the open daylight. The social air of a home that was lived in, pervaded this temporary baggage-room between the tracks. One child was asleep in a cradle, others were eating their coarse food off a board. When a sprinkling of rain fell, an old grandmother under an umbrella fastened to a bed-post went on knitting, serenely.

Youngsters who needed rubbers and waterproofs about as much as did Newfoundland dogs, enjoyed the fun. One four-year old, sitting on a tub turned upside down, was waving a small flag, a relic of the Fourth of July—and looking as happy and independent as a king.

It took all his wife's hopeful eloquence to comfort Tim. There was no water in Tim's cellar, because he had no cellar. The cow, their most valuable piece of property, was taken beyond the tracks up on the hillside, and fastened to a stake in a deserted vineyard. If the worst came to the worst, and they were drowned out of house and home, their neighbors were no better off, and they would all be lively together. That was the way Maggie put it.