ain, why could it not keep on doing that
all the time, until the balance was put straight again?"

"It would," the scientist agreed, "but for one thing you have
forgotten."

"And what's that?"

"The rotation of the earth."

A single drop of rain fell, then another, making a splash as large as a
twenty-five cent piece.

"Now see it come!" said the scientist.

As though his words had summoned it, a liquid opacity, like a piece of
clouded glass, thrust itself between their eyes and the landscape. So
suddenly it came that Stuart actually did not realize that this was
falling rain, until, looking at the ground, he saw the earth dissolve
into mud before his eyes and saw the garden turn into what seemed like
the bed of a shallow river. The wind whistled with a vicious note. The
squall lasted scarcely a minute, and was gone.

"That's the first," remarked the boy's informant. "We'd better get under
shelter, they'll come fast and furious soon."

Passing through a low passage connecting the house with the hurricane
wing, Stuart noticed that, beside the massiveness of the structure, it
was braced from within.

"In case the house should fall on it," the scientist observed, noting
Stuart's glances. "I've no wish to be buried alive. In any case, I keep
crowbars in the wing, so that, in case of any unforeseen disaster, a
breach could be made in the walls and we could get out that way."

They entered the hurricane wing. It was not as dark as Stuart had
expected. The scientist, anxious to observe the storms when they should
come, had built into the wall two double dead-eye windows, such as are
used in the lower decks of liners and which can resist the impact of the
heaviest waves.

The crimson light had gone. The vivid sunset reflections, now thrown
back from the black arch, yet gave a reddish smokiness to the livid and
sickly green which showed, from time to time, beneath the underhanging
masses of inky black. The sky to the north and to the south had a
tortured appearance, as though some demon of a size beyond imagining
were twisting the furies of the tempest in his clutch.

"You asked," said the scientist, speaking in the hurricane wing, as
quietly as he had on the verandah, and paying absolutely no heed to the
moaning and praying of the negroes huddled in the darkest corner, "what
makes a hurricane whirl. Yet, in the heavens, you can see the skies
a-twist!"

A second rain-squall struck. Thick as were the walls, they