one,--see how it stops to dance a jig and bore holes in the
earth!"

"Another exception to the general rule, which is as you say,"
admitted the professor. "Different tornadoes have been timed as
moving from twelve to seventy miles an hour, one passing a given
point in half a score of seconds, at another time being
registered as fully half an hour in clearing a single section.

"Take the destructive storm at Mount Carmel, Illinois, in June of
'77. That made progress at the rate of thirty-four miles an
hour, yet its force was so mighty that it tore away the spire,
vane, and heavy gilded ball of the Methodist church, and kept it
in air over a distance of fifteen miles.

"Still later was the Texas tornado, doing its awful work at the
rate of more than sixty miles an hour; while that which swept
through Frankfort, Kansas, on May 17, 1896, was fully a half-hour
in crossing a half-mile stretch of bottom-land adjoining the
Vermillion River, pausing in its dizzy waltz upon a single spot
for long minutes at a time."

"Couldn't have been much left when it got through dancing, if
that storm was anything like this one," declared Waldo, shivering
a bit as he watched the awful destruction being wrought right
before their fascinated eyes.

Trees were twisted off and doubled up like blades of dry grass.
Mighty rocks were torn apart from the rugged hills, and huge
boulders were tossed into air as though composed of paper. And