hat she and a
younger sister had been killed in a moment by the falling of their
house, and that Mrs. Hathaway was crippled for life. None of us had been
hurt but me. Mother had got beyond the track of the worst part of the
storm, but her horse was killed by the lightning. Father lost his barns,
most of his stock, and nearly all his crops.

"That's the story of the terrible tornado. Its path was not more than
half a mile wide, and it was all over in less than half an hour. Mother
says I grew five years older on that day, and I think she is right."

"MOONSHINERS."

BY E. H. MILLER.

CHAPTER I.

CONNY LOSES HIS FATHER.

Dr. Hunter was riding leisurely on his morning rounds among the few
people who managed to be sick at Dunsmore in spite of the clear sweet
air that carried the balmy scent of the forests into all its pleasant
valleys. Under the seat of his sulky was his little old-fashioned box of
medicines, and close at his hand a tin box containing what was in the
doctor's eyes quite as valuable--a specimen of a rare plant which he had
discovered in a cleft of gray rock, and secured at the cost of some
pretty hard climbing. The road upon which he was driving wound along the
mountain-side, and he could look down upon the tops of the trees below,
noting here and there the scattered buildings and stacks of feed that
marked some little farm in a clearing, and from the very densest spot of
all a faint thread of blue smoke rising above the trees. He had often
noticed it, and more than once had asked about it, but no one gave him
any satisfactory answer. You would have supposed that of all the men and
women in Dunsmore not one had even chanced to see that smoke until the
doctor's eyes had spied it.

"Smoke, sor?--so it be," said old Timothy, with a great pretense of
straining his eyes to see it. "It's a fire in the woods, belike. Some
tramping fellows on a hunt."

"It is always in one spot," said the doctor, "though sometimes it
disappears for weeks. Is there any road that way?"

"Not the track of a squurl, yer honor. There's not a wilder bit in all
the State, I'm thinkin'."

"I believe one might find a way on horseback," said the doctor, "and I
shall try it some day."

"Ye'd best not do it. I'd be loath to see ye leaving a good trade for a
bad one." Timothy grasped his hickory cane, and shook his grizzled head
at the doctor. Then, coming a step nearer, he whispered,
"_Moonshiners_."

"To be sure," said