county, and as it was a good many years ago, it is fair to assume that
I was a good many years younger than I am now, and that the country in
that region was younger too. Everybody knows that Alleghany county is,
or used to be, a great place for whirlwinds and tornadoes. If they do
not, they may understand and be assured of the fact now. A few years
(less than twelve) ago, a black cloud came looming up in the
northwest, and started on its career towards the southeast. As it
swept along, it sent its fierce winds crashing, and howling, and
roaring, through the old forests, uprooting, hurling to the ground,
and scattering everything that encountered its fury. Houses, barns,
haystacks, fences, trees, everything were prostrated, and to this day
its track is visible in the swath it mowed through the old woods, from
sixty to a hundred rods wide, plain and distinct still, for miles and
miles. It was not of that tornado, however, that I propose to speak.
Others had preceded it, and in the country all about Angelica were
what were called 'windfalls.' These windfalls were neither more nor
less than the old tracks of these whirlwinds and tornadoes, that had
swept down the forest trees. Fire had finished what the whirlwind
begun. In time, blackberry-bushes had grown up among the charred
trunks of the old pines, and other trees, bearing an immensity of
fruit; and it was a pleasant resort for young people, one of those
windfalls, when the blackberries were ripe and luscious. These
windfalls were great places, too, for rabbits, partridges, and 'such
small deer,' and it was no great thing to boast of, to kill a dozen or
two of the birds of an afternoon.

"I went out with a friend one day to one of these windfalls, partly
after blackberries, and partly for partridges. We were both boys,
younger than fifteen, then, and each possessing, probably, quite as
much discretion as valor. We had separated a short distance from each