comments upon the legs and general contour of such
unfortunates as necessity took out, while those pedestrians who would
converse, upon catching sight of each other made a dive for the nearest
telephone pole. There, clinging by an arm like a shipwrecked sailor to a
mast, they ventured to opine that it must be "getting ready for
something." It seemed as though the earth would soon be denuded of its
soil, leaving the rocks exposed like a skeleton stripped of its flesh.
Yet, day after day, it blew without respite, and the effect of it upon
different temperaments was as varied as that of drink.

No one could seem to remember that the wind had not always blown, or
realize that it would sometime stop. No character was strong enough to
maintain a perfect equilibrium after three days of it. Logic or
philosophy made no more impression upon the mental state than water
slipping over a rock. It set the nerves on edge. Irritation,
restlessness and discontent were as uncontrollable as great fear. Two
wildcats tied together were not more incompatible than husbands and
wives, who under normal conditions lived together happily. Doting
mothers became shrews; fond fathers, brutes, lambasting their offspring
on the smallest pretext; while seven was too conservative an estimate to
place upon the devils of which the children who turned the house into
Bedlam seemed to be possessed.

Optimists grew green with melancholia, pessimists considered suicide as
an escape from the futility of life, neighbors resurrected buried
hatchets. Friends found fault with friends. Enemies vowed to kill each
other as soon as the wind let up.

If the combination of wind and altitude had this effect upon phlegmatic
temperaments, something of Mrs. Toomey's state may be surmised. With
nerves already overwrought this prolonged windstorm put her in a
condition in which, as she declared hysterically to her husband, she was
"ready to fly."

Lying on his back on the one-time handsome sofa, where he spent many of
his waking hours, Toomey responded, grimly:

"I'm getting so light on that breakfast-food diet that we'll both fly if
I don't make a 'touch' pretty quick. I'm 'most afraid to go out in a
high wind without running a little shot in the bottoms of my trousers."

Mrs. Toomey, who was standing at the dining room table laying a section
of a newspaper pattern upon a piece of serge, felt an uncontrollable
desire to weep. Furthermore, the conviction seized her that,