r talk of others
which HE remembered--with comment on the destruction they had wrought
far and wide, on the suffering of all stock and of the wild creatures.
The ravage had been more terrible in the forests, his father had
thought, than what the cyclones cause when they rush upon the trees,
heavy in their full summer-leaves, and sweep them down as easily as
umbrellas set up on the ground. So much of the finest forests of
Kentucky had been lost through its annual summer tempests and its rarer
but more awful wintry sleets.

No work for him in the hemp fields to-morrow, nor for days. No school
for Gabriella; the more distant children would be unable to ride; the
nearest unable to foot it through the mirrored woods; unless the
weather should moderate before morning and melt the ice away as quickly
as it had formed--as sometimes was the case. A good sign of this, he
took it, was the ever rising wind: for a rising wind and a falling
temperature seldom appeared together. As he bent his ear listening, he
could hear the wild roar of the surges of air breaking through the
forest, the edge of which was not fifty yards away.

David sprang from his chair; there was a loud crack, and the great limb
of the cedar swept rattling down across his shutters, twisted, snapped
off at the trunk, rolled over in the air, and striking the ground on
its back, lay like a huge animal knocked lifeless.

He forgot bed and sleep and replenished his fire. His ear, trained to
catch and to distinguish sounds of country life, was now becoming alive
to the commencement of one of those vast appalling catastrophes in
Nature, for which man sees no reason and can detect the furtherance of
no plan--law being turned with seeming blindness, and in the spirit of
sheer wastage, upon what it has itself achieved, and spending its
sublime forces in a work of self-desolation.

Of the two windows in his room, one opened upon the back yard, one upon
the front. Both back yard and front contained, according to the custom
of the country, much shrubbery, with aged fruit trees, mostly cherry
and peach. There were locusts also at the rear of the house, the
old-time yard favorite of the people; other forest trees stood around.
Through both his windows there began to reach him a succession of
fragile sounds; the snapping of rotten, weakest, most overburdened
twigs. On fruit tree and forest tree these went down first--as is also
the law of storm and trial of strength among men