office clock, but no one in the vicinity had ever seen it before, and no one knows where it came from. It was badly broken, but the hands still pointed to 8:20 P.M. A large slab of marble was found in a residence on West Madison street which was never there before. It will weigh over one hundred pounds. At Baird’s drug store on Market above Ninth, two bird cages with the birds were blown in through the skylight. The cages were not injured, and the birds are as full of song as ever. When the building occupied by Brand & Bethel, the tobacco men of Green street, went to pieces, a portion of the frame-work dropped through the roof of a little cottage just east of the factory. It consisted of a heavy timber, to which were mortised four upright pieces of timber. When this came through the cottage the family were sitting around the table in the dining-room, and the four uprights simply pinned them in but did not hurt them in the least. It was one of the most wonderful escapes yet heard of.”
To the unexperienced reader some of these items seem almost apocryphal. But when it is remembered that a tallow candle may be shot through a deal board, or that an ox may be killed by a putty-ball fired from a gun, or that a revolver loaded with water instead of ball is a deadly weapon, it will not seem preposterous that a cage may be hurled through a skylight without seriously discommoding the birds. The writer has seen soft pine shingles driven endwise through oak boards an inch thick by a Missouri tornado. Other similar cases might be given.
The carrying of objects to a distance depends as much on the upward current as the horizontal motion. One of the simplest illustrations of the inevitable spiral course that an upward or downward current pursues may be seen in the ordinary wash-bowl with hole in the bottom. As soon as the plug is drawn and the water commences to
RUINED TOBACCO WAREHOUSES.
pour out, it begins to assume a spiral course; and, long before the water is out, there is a circular hole in the fluid, reaching to the bottom of the basin. This last illustrates also that the air is rarest at the center of the storm. Pouring liquids through a funnel will show the same spiral tendency. So an object borne away by a tornado rises in curves much like those of a hawk or eagle in flying.