It was many, many years after Adam and Eve were driven out from the Garden of Eden that the flood came.
There were thousands of people in the world now, and they were scattered here and there through the fertile valleys and along the rivers of the country far and wide.
There were rich farms everywhere, and shepherds watched their flocks on the hillsides. There were towns and cities; many of them where people dwelt together and made their laws and appointed their law-givers.
But in all these years the people had been growing more and more away from the simple, honest life that God had first shown Adam and Eve.
They had grown selfish and greedy; they were cruel to each other; they cared nothing for the rights and comforts of the community; and more than all this, they had forsaken the simple faith of their fathers and become worshippers of idols.
There was one good man dwelling among these people, many, many years before, whose name was Enoch. Now, it was not the will of God that Enoch should suffer for the sins of the people; and so, when the flood was about to come upon the earth to destroy them, God came and stood by Enoch and said, "Come with me."
Now there was another good man upon the earth, a great grandson of Enoch's, and a man who had never forgotten God, and who had reared his children always in the simple faith which had been his own.
Although God meant to send a flood that should destroy the cities, and separate the people so that the wickedness of the earth might be destroyed, still it was not his wish that the race should perish wholly. And so again God went down to the earth, and said to this good man, Noah, "Build thou an ark, and into it bring all thy family, and also two of every kind of bird and beast and animal. For a great flood shall come upon the earth, and those in the ark only shall be saved."
Noah was a simple hearted man. It was a strange thing for him to be told to build an ark and place within its shelter his family and two of every living thing upon the face of the earth.
[Illustration: NOAH BUILDING THE ARK. (_Raphael._)]
He told the people what God had said to him; and he urged them to do likewise. But the people only laughed at him, and called him a fool.