102 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



this it uprooted a solitary large tree, and carried it twenty or thirty 

 yards, to a valley at the farther side of the hill. Near this it unroofed 

 two barns, a workshop, and a dwelling-house. All the doors of the 

 house were burst open outwardly. A female standing in the middle of 

 a room was hurled out of the door, and carried in a line with the pro- 

 gressive tornado across the road, and lodged against a fence. A wagon 

 standing near was lifted and carried some distance. The approach of 

 a whirlwind was apprehended by a workman in the shop, before it had 

 struck, from the falling of a shower of apples on the roof, which it 

 seems had been carried into the air from the orchard it had passed 

 through, and which were precipitated from the anterior edge of the 

 cloud. In a ^e\v seconds the pendant cone reached the shop, and un- 

 roofed it. A few rods farther in its progress, it took two women from 

 a cart and carried them into a field. A few rods onward, it was seen 

 approaching by a man who was leading a child, and fearing it would 

 separate them, he clasped the child in his arms and fell on the ground ; 

 but they were both raised and borne for several yards. Passing 

 through a potato-field, it dug up the potatoes, and scattered them far 

 and wide. A small pond that lay in its path was drained ; and, cours- 

 ing through a large nursery-garden, it laid the shrubs and small trees 

 as flat as if done by a roller, uprooted or fractured the large trees, and 

 despoiled them of their foliage. An apple-orchard near by was served 



V 



in like manner. Its approach being now discovered by a school-teach- 

 er, from a chamber window, she hastened her little scholars from the 

 chamber, which was over a back kitchen, into the main building, which 

 they had barely reached when a dairy-house was raised in the air 

 and thrown on the school-room, breaking through its roof. It then 

 passed over a bleachery, and destroyed a row of buildings, whose roofs 

 appeared to open, and in a moment to rise up in the air. ' The whole 

 house,' says Mr. Allen, who was within a few fathoms, 'appeared to 

 crumble, and to become a mass of ruins in motion, which one could 

 see through the cloud which enveloped it as a cloak of vapor. At the 

 moment when the lower extremity of the cone passed over the crum- 

 bling building, all the debris appeared to be shot into the air, as if from 

 an exploded mine.' The noise resembled that of the letting off of 

 steam from an engine, only not so cavernous. 



" The tornado had now reached the shore of Narraganset Bay, in 

 crossing which it presented to view a water instead of a land spout, and 

 established their essential identity in the minds of any who doubted. 



