I desire to state that my position as United States Cyclonist for this
Judicial District is now vacant. I resigned on the 9th day of September,
A. D. 1884.
I have not the necessary personal magnetism to look a cyclone in the eye
and make it quail. I am stern and even haughty in my intercourse with
men, but when a Manitoba simoon takes me by the brow of my pantaloons
and throws me across Township 28, Range 18, West of the 5th Principal
Meridian, I lose my mental reserve and become anxious and even taciturn.
For thirty years I had yearned to see a grown-up cyclone, of the
ring-tail-puller variety, mop up the green earth with huge forest trees
and make the landscape look tired. On the 9th day of September, A. D.
1884, my morbid curiosity was gratified.
As the people came out into the forest with lanterns and pulled me out
of the crotch of a basswood tree with a "tackle and fall," I remember
I told them I didn't yearn for any more atmospheric phenomena. The old
desire for a hurricane that would blow a cow through a penitentiary was
satiated. I remember when the doctor pried the bones of my leg together,
in order to kind of draw my attention away from the limb, he asked me
how I liked the fall style of Zephyr in that locality.
I said it was all right, what there was of it. I said this in a tone of
bitter irony.
Cyclones are of two kinds, viz.: the dark maroon cyclone, and the iron
gray cyclone with pale green mane and tail. It was the latter kind I
frolicked with on the above-named date.
My brother and I were riding along in the grand old forest, and I had
just been singing a few bars from the opera of "Whoop 'em Up, Lizzie
Jane," when I noticed that the wind was beginning to sough through the
trees. Soon after that, I noticed that I was soughing through the
trees also, and I am really no slouch of a sougher, either, when I get
started.
[Illustration: 0144]
The horse was hanging by the breeching from the bough of a large
butter-nut tree, waiting for some one to come and pick him.
I did not see my brother at first, but after a while he disengaged
himself from a rail fence and came where I was hanging, wrong end up,
with my personal effects spilling out of my pockets. I told him that as
soon as the wind kind of softened down, I wished he would go and pick
the horse. He did so, and at midnight a party of friends carried me into
town on a stretcher. It was quite an ovation. To think of a torchlight
procession coming way out there into the woods at midnight, and carrying
me into town on their shoulders in triumph! And yet I was once only a
poor boy!
It shows what may be accomplished by anyone if he will persevere and
insist on living a different life.
The cyclone is a natural phenomenon, enjoying the most robust health.
It may be a pleasure for a man with great will power and an iron
constitution to study more carefully into the habits of the cyclone, but
as far as I am concerned, individually, I could worry along some way if
we didn't have a phenomenon in the house from one year's end to another.
As I sit here, with my leg in a silicate cfsoda corset, and watch the
merry throng promenading down the street, or mingling in the giddy
torchlight procession, I cannot repress a feeling toward a cyclone that
almost amounts to disgust.