urally dragged the plow out
of the furrows, but as one rarely sees a straight row of corn in
Kansas, Jonathan was not worried. If he took pains to sow the corn
straight, in trim and systematic rows, like as not the wind would blow
the seed out of the ground into his neighbor's cornfield, so what was
the use?

"Like the horse and plough, Jonathan was walking crooked, bent in the
direction of the wind. He seldom walks straight or talks straight for
that matter, the wind has had such an effect on him.

"At any rate, leaving out the question of his reasoning which pursues
a devious and zigzag course, varying according to the way the wind
blows--and he is not alone in this peculiarity in Kansas, as I
say--Jonathan steadily toiled against the wind, he stopped altogether,
and taking out his lunch basket, he removed a pie and sat down on a
log to eat it, while his horse, moving a little further along, propped
himself against a cottonwood tree to keep from being entirely blown
away, and also rested."

He swapped tobacco wads from one cheek to the other and continued:

"The pie was made of custard, Jonathan said, with meringue on the top.
The meringue blew away, but Jonathan contentedly ate the custard,
thankful that the hungry wind had not taken that.

"Mrs. Jonathan had been going about all morning with a dust rag in her
hand, wiping the dust from the sills and the furniture.

"So, tired out at last, she had flung herself on the bed and was
quietly napping when the cyclone came along.

"Of course, the house and the bed she was lying on were shaken, but
Mrs. Jonathan had lived so long in Kansas she couldn't sleep unless
the wind rocked the bed.

"She slept all the sounder, therefore, lulled by its whistling and
moaning and sobbing, not waking even when Cyclona, this girl they had
adopted, opened the door and shut it suddenly with herself on the
inside, and a fortunate thing, too, that was for Cyclona, or the
cyclone might have left her behind.

"Cyclona, standing by the window, saw it all, the swiftly passing
landscape, the trees, the cows, as one would look from an observation
car on a train.

"The house was at last deposited rather roughly on terra firma and the
jar awoke Mrs. Jonathan. She sat up and rubbed her eyes open. Then she
looked about her in some alarm.

"The furniture was tumbled together in one corner all in a heap,
Jonathan says, and the pictures were topsy turvy. Pictures are never
on a level on Ka