during
the passage of the storm. Afterward it was found that the magnetic
influence was so strong that clocks and watches were stopped and
rendered wholly useless.

The scooping action of the tornado sometimes makes considerable changes
in the topography of the country, as when it gathers up the water of a
large pond or water course and makes a new pond or opens a new channel.
At Wallingford the water in a pond of very large size was taken bodily
from its bed, carried up a hill and dropped nearly in one mass, so that
gullies and ravines were cut in every direction.

There is a divide in Northeastern Illinois between streams flowing into
Lake Michigan and those running to the Mississippi. So level is a
portion of the land on the summit, and so slight the elevation above
the lake, that in wet seasons the surface-water seems almost as willing
to go one way as the other; and on one occasion the upper streams of
the Desplaines River were nearly permanently diverted toward the lake
by a tornado that gathered up the water and scored the surface in its
track toward the east.

Many are the stories told of the way in which objects are carried away
by the wind and left in strange places. In one Illinois tornado two
children and an infant were caught up. The dead bodies of the children
were found only a few hundred feet distant, but the infant was picked
up alive more than a mile away from the spot where the tornado swept
the children up. An accordion that must have come a long distance--for
it was never claimed--was found so entangled in the branches of a tree
that it was alternately pulled apart and pressed together by the wind,
thus creating such weird and uncanny music during a whole night that an
already sufficiently scared settlement of negroes were kept in a state
of frantic dismay until daylight revealed the cause.

In another case a farmer who followed the tornado's track in search of
missing cattle was astonished to discover one of his cows lodged about
twenty feet above the ground in the branches of a half-stripped maple.

"I allers knew that was an active heifer," he remarked, as he came in
sight of her hanging over the slanting limb, "but I never allowed she
could climb a tree."

LOST IN A BLIZZARD.

If I were given my choice between a visit from a cyclone or a blizzard,
I would unhesitatingly choose the former. True, there is no resisting
its terrific power, and a man caught in its embrace is as h