and soft and fine, satin
slippers, fans, gloves and a wedding gown of dazzling snowiness.

The day was set for the wedding. Unfortunately--how could she know
that?--the same day was set for a cyclone.

The girl could almost hear the peal of the wedding bells; when along
came the tornado, rushing, roaring, shrieking like mad, and grasping
that wing of the house, that special and precious wing containing her
trousseau, bore it triumphantly off.

A silk waist was found in one county, but the skirt to match it lay in
another, many miles away. Her beplumed hat floated in a pool of
disfiguring water, her long suede gloves lay in a ditch and her white
satin wedding slippers, alas, hung by their tiny heels at the top of a
tree in a neighboring township, the only tree in the entire
surrounding county, put there, in all probability, to catch and hold
them for her.

Naturally, the wedding was postponed until new wedding finery could be
prepared, but alas! A man's will is the wind's will!

By the time the second trousseau was well on the way, the affections
of the girl's sweetheart had wafted away and wound themselves about
another girl.

Here and there the prairie farmers had planted out trees in rows and
clumps, taking tree claims from the Government for that purpose.

In many instances cyclones had bent these prospective forests double
in their extreme youth, leaving them to grow that way, leaning heavily
forward in the attitude of old men running.

Of course, there were demons. God could have nothing to do with their
devilments, Seth said. Seth had great belief in God.

One had maliciously torn up all the churches in a town by the roots,
turned them upside down and stuck their steeples in the ground as if
in mockery of religion.

"Why do you call them cyclones?" the old man at the corner grocery had
asked. "They are not cyclones. They are tornadoes."

And this old man who had once been a doctor of medicine in an Eastern
village and who was therefore learned, though he had been persuaded by
some Wise men to go West and grow up with the Fools, went on to
explain the difference.

"A cyclone," he said, "is miles and miles in width. It sweeps across
the prairie screeching and screaming, but doing not so very much
damage as it might do, just getting on the nerves of the people and
helping to drive them insane. That is all.

"Then along comes a hailstone. It drops into the southeast corner of
this cyclone and there y