Carried in the air three miles from their stable.
Grand piano picked up by a tornado and dropped in a cow-pasture.
Courtesy of T. B. Jennings, U.S. Weather Bureau, Topeka, Kans.
"That's why you hear the crackle of near-by thunder. You are near enough to hear the explosions made by all the little side-branches of the lightning flash—you can hear the same sometimes when you comb your hair or rub a cat's fur—while the big crashes are due to your hearing, all at once, the main wave of sound set in action by the flash jumping from the cloud to the earth or from one cloud to another.
"The rumble of the thunder—which used to be thought the rolling of a chariot in the sky, is due to the different distances of various portions of the discharge, to the echo of the explosions from the projecting hills and valleys of the cloud forms, and to the irregular shape of the earth, when the sound waves strike the ground."
"Hail is electric, too, isn't it?" said Anton. "In a hail-storm the other day I noticed that the hail jumped up a lot higher from an old piece of iron that lay on the ground than from a stone right beside it. I tried the iron and the stone with a marble, after the storm was over, and the marble bounced higher from the stone. I figured that there must be some kind of electric repulsion and that the hail must be electrified."
"It is, very often," the Forecaster answered. "In some very violent electric storms, you'll see hail jump up as if it were alive, when it strikes the earth. Of course, boys, there's some slight elasticity in a hail-stone, too, because a good many of them are made like an onion or a pearl, with a number of layers round each other."