disordered. The sleet must have been falling for hours to have
weighed them down this way and that. A peculiarity of the night was
the wind, which increased constantly, but with fitful violence,
giving no warning of its high swoop, seizure, and wrench.

Sleet! Scarce a winter but he had seen some little: once, in his
childhood, a great one. He had often heard his father talk of
others which HE remembered--with comment on the destruction they
had wrought far and wide, on the suffering of all stock and of the
wild creatures. The ravage had been more terrible in the forests,
his father had thought, than what the cyclones cause when they rush
upon the trees, heavy in their full summer-leaves, and sweep them
down as easily as umbrellas set up on the ground. So much of the
finest forests of Kentucky had been lost through its annual summer
tempests and its rarer but more awful wintry sleets.

No work for him in the hemp fields to-morrow, nor for days. No
school for Gabriella; the more distant children would be unable to
ride; the nearest unable to foot it through the mirrored woods;
unless the weather should moderate before morning and melt the ice
away as quickly as it had formed--as sometimes was the case. A good
sign of this, he took it, was the ever rising wind: for a rising
wind and a falling temperature seldom appeared together. As he bent
his ear listening, he could hear the wild roar of the surges of air
breaking through the forest, the edge of which was not fifty yards
away.

David sprang from his chair; there was a loud crack, and the great
limb of the cedar swept rattling down across his shutters, twisted,
snapped off at the trunk, rolled over in the air, and striking the