34 WE FARM FOR A HOBBY 



of life nor even wounds. But it did visit us with 

 nearly every other misfortune flesh is heir to. It 

 tore away our electric wiring. "Where we lay ... 

 the chimneys were blown down"; there was neither 

 light nor fire for cooking or heating the house, 

 for days. We lifted all water from the well by hand. 

 Not only windows, but entire casements were 

 blown out on that side of the house facing the 

 storm. Everything in the living room and it is a 

 big room, full of furniture was piled up in one 

 corner. Our neighbor's barn, which was wrecked, 

 checked the full force of the wind. Unhappily 

 there were sixteen tons of loose straw in the barn. 

 Fifteen of them blew into our house. Two sixty- 

 foot pine trees leaned against the house like toy 

 trees swept over on a nursery floor by a giant skirt. 

 The tool shed and corn crib disappeared with the 

 carry-over of last year's corn and most of the hens. 

 The little greenhouse we had built on the south 

 side of the garage was smashed to atoms. I car- 

 ried the pieces of the children's bedroom door 

 and it was no slouch of a door; but hand-hewn and 

 mortised oak down stairs in a five-eighths basket. 

 The children were not in the room when the storm 

 struck; otherwise they would almost certainly have 

 been decapitated by the flying roof slates that cut 

 the door down to kindling. We were so discour- 

 aged and terrified we put a For Sale sign on the 

 place. Thus I learned that such storms are the 



