Cyclones are of two kinds—viz., the dark maroon cyclone, and the iron grey cyclone with pale green mane and tail. It was the latter kind I frolicked with on the above-named date.
My brother and I were riding along in the grand old forest, and I had just been singing a few bars from the opera of “Whoop ’em up, Lizzie Jane,” when I noticed that the wind was beginning to sough through the trees. Soon after that I noticed that I was soughing through the trees also, and I am really no slouch of a sougher either when I get started.
The horse was hanging by the breeching from the bough of a large butternut tree, waiting for some one to come and pick him.
I did not see my brother at first, but after a while he disengaged himself from a rail fence, and came where I was hanging, wrong end up, with my personal effects spilling out of my pockets. I told him that as soon as the wind kind of softened down, I wished he would go and pick the horse. He did so, and at midnight a party of friends carried me into town on a stretcher. It was quite an ovation. To think of a torchlight procession coming out way out there into the woods at midnight, and carrying me into town on their shoulders in triumph! And yet I was once a poor boy!
It shows what may be accomplished by any one if he will persevere and insist on living a different life.
The cyclone is a natural phenomenon, enjoying the most robust health. It may be a pleasure for a man with great will power and an iron constitution to study more carefully into the habits of the cyclone, but as far as I am concerned, individually, I could worry along some way if we didn’t have a phenomenon in the house from one year’s end to another.
As I sit here, with my leg in a silicate of soda corset, and watch the merry throng promenading down the street, or mingling in the giddy torchlight procession, I cannot repress a feeling toward a cyclone that almost amounts to disgust.
Bill Nye.