"Tornado" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... own wild imaginings. I thought of the nuns who had been murdered so cruelly, and I listened to the voice of the storm, as to the despairing wail of a lost soul. The wind swept fiercely through the leafless branches, now roaring like a tornado, again rising to a shrill shriek, or a prolonged whistle, then sinking to a hollow murmer, and dying away in a low sob which sounded to my excited fancy like the last convulsive sigh of a breaking heart. Once and again I paused, faint and dizzy with hunger and fatigue, feeling as though ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... early saw that Louisiana was indeed a speck in our horizon, which was to burst in a tornado; and the public are un-apprized how near this catastrophe was. Nothing but a frank and friendly developement of causes and effects on our part, and good sense enough in Bonaparte to see that the train was ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... him: thrice had claimed the reaping, With scythe of fire, of lands she once had sown; Sent the tornado, round his hearthstone heaping Rafters, dead faces ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... both passed this small gate and entered the close, neither of them spoke a word, but the precentor clearly saw from his companion's face that a tornado was to be expected, nor was he himself inclined to stop it. Though by nature far less irritable than the archdeacon, even he was angry: he even—that mild and courteous man—was inclined to express himself in ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... thousand mountains blazing; And the khamsheens wild and fiercely Sweep in burning flakes along them, And torment the weary traveller Who is slowly wading through them, Thirsting for a cooling river. And 'tis there the wild tornado Riseth in its frame of terror, Wild, and fierce, and unrelenting. To the spreading woods and forests Of the black pine and the myrtle, Of the cedar and the red birch, Of the oak tree and the walnut, Of the tulip and mahogany, All in branchy ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... suddenly appeared to open and let down whole solid snow-banks at once, which were caught and torn to pieces by the ravenous winds, and the traveller was instantaneously enveloped in a whirling mass far denser than any fog; it was a tornado with snow stirred into it. Standing in the middle of the road, with houses close on every side, one could see absolutely nothing in any direction, one could hear no sound but the storm. Every landmark vanished, and it was no more possible to guess the points of the compass than in mid-ocean. It was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... one word to reply. He however, made a weak and unavailing attempt to appease the wrath of the Long Island Indians. But the roaring tornado of savage vengeance could not thus be divested of its terrors. The messengers he sent, approaching a band of Indians, cried out to them, "We come to you as friends." They shouted back contemptuously, "Are you our friends? You are only ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... power of such catastrophes make them an object of overwhelming fear. The evening of Easter Sunday in Omaha was doubtless as placid and uneventful as a thousand predecessors, until an appalling roar and increasing darkness announced to the initiated the approach of a tornado, and in a few minutes forty-seven city blocks were leveled to the ground. The fairest and best built part of the city could no more withstand this awful force than the weakest hovels. Twelve hundred buildings were ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... a veritable tornado had burst. Four sullen, gray-clad girls bowed their heads before the storm of passionate reproaches hurled upon them by their irate leader. They were seeing and hearing Mignon at her worst, and they did not relish it. It may be set down to their credit that not one of them took the ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... landed on his back. Once there, he seized an ear between his strong teeth and shut down. We rose to our feet and yelled. It was wonderful, but chaotic. I would defy a moving-picture camera to resolve that tornado into its elements of deer and Injun. We were conscious of curious illusions, such as a deer with a dozen heads growing out of all parts of a body as spherical as this, our earth, and an Injun with legs that vetoed all laws of gravitation ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... had never before seen a man under the absolute and unresisted power of one of the basal passions, and neither he nor any one else has ever understood life until he has witnessed that fearful spectacle. A summer breeze conveys no more idea of a tornado, nor a burning chimney of a volcano, than ordinary vices convey of that fearful ruin which any elemental passion works when permitted to devastate a soul, unrestrained. The sight filled Mantel with terror, and he felt himself compelled ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... it, so onselfish is a woman's heart, even in the midst of her deepest tribulations, and so kinder sentimental, her words sent a faint ray of joy over my heart, some like the pale light of a star shinin' out over a wild western tornado. But before I could reply Ury come runnin' down stairs holdin' Philury, faithful critter that he wuz, and Josiah yelled at him: "Do you go over to Kellup Wind's and bring that cussed fool over here, and if he don't take out that invention of his under ten minutes I will have the law ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... subsequently became unpleasantly familiar, but was then regarded as a gross breach of the conventions of debate. 'Jim' lay back on the Treasury bench with his hat over his eyes, and to all appearance sound asleep. Never once did he show sign of hearing their verbal tornado; but eventually he sprang to his feet, and with infectious gaiety literally chaffed them to madness. I have often thought that the long-limbed Tory member for Hertford, who was then private secretary to his uncle, Lord ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... reversal to winter took place. "The day remained beautifully springlike till about two o'clock when a gray haze came rushing downward from the north-west. Big black clouds developed with portentous rapidity. Thunder arose, and an icy wind, furious and swift as a tornado roared among the trees. The rain, chilled almost into hail, drummed on the shingles. The birds fell silent, the hens scurried to shelter. In ten minutes the cutting blast died out. A dead calm succeeded. Then out burst the sun, flooding the land with laughter! The ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Cantankerous Old Lady overwhelmed me with the warmth of her thanks and praises. Nay, more; after breakfast next morning, before we set out by slow train for Schlangenbad, she burst like a tornado into my bedroom at the Cologne hotel with a cheque for twenty guineas, drawn in my favour. 'That's for you, my dear,' she said, handing it to me, and looking ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... shoulder; Tom Ross did as much for the other, but the older two scorned help. They were full of admiration for the great woodsmen, mighty heroes who had suddenly appeared out of the air, as it were, and who had swept like a tornado over the Seneca band. It did not seem possible now ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... like a tornado," said Captain 'Siah to the passenger who was smoking his pipe on ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... of becoming amassed, condensed and rarefied. In the tornado that happened at Natchez, in 1840, the houses exploded whenever the doors and windows were shut, the roofs shooting up into the air, and the walls even of the strongest buildings bursting outward with ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... TORNADO. A peculiar squall, accompanied with rain and lightning, similar in suddenness to the white squall of the West Indies, and experienced off the equatorial region of the west coast of Africa between December and June. It ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... they are always battling. The oak is but a foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that holds the future vegetable world in solution. The storm that tears its leaves has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the tornado clad in the spoils of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... settlements, and encamped opposite Yuma. After some of these people had been sent forward or back as the plans demanded, Moncada remained at the camp with a few of his soldiers. No one suspected the tornado which was brewing. All the life of the camp, of the missions, and of the Yumas went on with the same apparent smoothness, but it was only a delusion suddenly and horribly dispelled on the fateful ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... known, in practice, to the experienced; a very concise but sure rule may be added, for avoiding the central or strongest part of a hurricane, cyclone, typhoon, tornado, or circling storm. ...
— Barometer and Weather Guide • Robert Fitzroy
... in a spiteful falsetto key, and the rain lashed the old tavern as if it were a balky horse that refused to move on. The windows rattled in the worm-eaten frames, and the doors of remote rooms, where nobody ever went, slammed to in the maddest way. Now and then the tornado, sweeping down the side of Mount Agamenticus, bowled across the open country, and struck ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... calculated to try the confidence in the new system. Yet we find all classes zealously exonerating emancipation, and in despite of tornado, plague, and wasting, still affirming the blessings ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... watched his power declining. All ten UV beams were united in one now, driving a terrible sword of energy that made the attacked ship skip for safety instantly, yet the beams were all but useless. For the Miran reserves filled the gap, and the magnetic tornado continued. ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... him susceptible to the fascination of the fair but treacherous Egyptian queen. Achilles was a symbolical as well as an historical character. There was one place—with him in the heel—where he was vulnerable, and through that he fell. Socrates was like a tornado when inflamed by anger. Napoleon laid Europe waste and desolated more distant lands, but he was an enormous egotist and morally a ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... sleeping the dreamless sleep— Sleeping the sleep of the babe unborn—the pure and the perfect rest: Aye, and is it not better than this fitful fever and pain? Aye, and is it not better, if only the dead soul knew? Dead Ashes, what do you care if it storm, if it shine, if it shower? Hail-storm, tornado or tempest, or the blinding blizzard of snow, Or the mid-May showers on the blossoms with the glad sun blinking between, Dead Ashes, what do you care?—they break not the sleep ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... was an oak which had been upturned by some wrenching tornado or storm. The roots protruded upward and from the sides, the dirt still clinging to them, so that the bottom spread out ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... passion! He is almost tempted to fly down-stairs and confront Eugene and have it out with him. To go at this fragile little wraith, who is now pale as a snow-drop, would be too unmanly. He holds himself firmly in hand, and the tornado of jealousy sweeps over him. Why has he never experienced it before? Can it be that he has come to love her so supremely? His brain seems to swim around, he drops into the chair and gives a gasp for breath at this strange revelation. Yes, he loves her, and she would be happier with Eugene! ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... inundated with catastrophes, capitalists foundered, schemes were swamped, the armies surged to and fro. The De Willoughby land was marched and fought over; scores of hasty, shallow graves were dug in it and filled; buildings and machinery were destroyed as if a tornado had passed by. The Judge was a ruined man; his realisable property he had allowed to pass from his hands, his coal remained in the bowels of the earth, the huge income he was to have drawn from ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Polly Hawks!" he shouts. "Show me the female more entrancin', an' let me drop dead at her feet! Who is lovelier than Polly Hawks, the sweetheart of Flyin' Bison, the onchained tornado of the hills! Feast your gaze on Polly Hawks; her beauty would melt the heart of Nacher! I'm the Purple Blossom of Gingham Mountain; Polly Hawks shall marry an' follow me to my wigwam! Her bed shall be of b'ar-skins; her food shall be yearlin' venison, an' wild honey from the tree! Her ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... They had not tarried an instant in their wild course. Down the slope of the fields they had hurried in a mad rush, plunged into the woody creek below, and, leaving the underbrush and vines broken and flattened as if a tornado had passed through the land, had thundered away across the flat floor of the bottom-land on the further side of the creek. A broad brown track behind them showed that they had then fled into the dim distance of the lands of the Chapman's ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... corner of Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street, just as that tornado broke, he tried to cross the street. He got in a jam of cars, and of course the windshields were all mussed up with rain, and the chauffeurs couldn't see anything ahead—and they don't know whose car it was. The police say it was ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... been gone a week, and the time of his absence seemed like that sinister lull which comes after the sudden shock of an earthquake and the tornado that follows upon it. Then, one ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... of person who always comes out on top whether he wins or loses," said Fielding, striding up the long room at the moment. "You've not seen him play cricket yet, Miss Moore. He's a positive tornado on the cricket-ground. To-morrow's Saturday, isn't it? Where are you ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... wrought by that tornado was everywhere visible. Near us were the ruins of a lighthouse. In old days it had glimmered for distant mariners, who pointed to it as the Dardanelles light. But, at the outbreak of war, the Turk had closed his Dardanelles and put out the lamp. He would never kindle ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... thee, O son of AEolus! All hail to thee, most high Borean lord! The lineal descendant of the Winds art thou. Child of the Cyclone, Cousin to the Hurricane, Tornado's twin, All hail! The zephyrs of the balmy south Do greet thee; The eastern winds, great Boston's pride, In manner osculate caress thy massive cheek; Freeze onto thee, And at thy word throw off congealment And take on a soft caloric mood; And from afar, From Afric's strand, Siroccan greetings come ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... which passed over Europe like a tornado, made itself felt in the Scandinavian peninsula, where it gave rise to radical changes. In the preceding tale its effect upon Denmark was shown. While the wars which desolated Europe did not reach the soil of Sweden and ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... going out and in a large, irregular opening. In June a violent tempest of wind and rain demolished the tree, and the honey was all lost in the creek into which it fell. I happened along that way two or three days after the tornado, when I saw a remnant of the swarm, those, doubtless, that escaped the flood and those that were away when the disaster came, hanging in a small black mass to a branch high up near where their home used to be. They looked forlorn enough. If the queen was saved the remnant probably ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... Martial's room like a tornado. "I think you must certainly have gone mad, Marquis," he exclaimed. "That is the only valid excuse ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... Mr. Daney considered this situation, the more convinced did he become that mischief was brewing. Did not periods of seraphic calm always precede a tornado? In the impending social explosion, a few hard missiles would most certainly come his way, and in a sudden agony of apprehension and shame because he had told The Laird a half-truth, he sprang to his feet, resolved to seek old Hector, inform him that Mrs. McKaye had compromised ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... recovered from the stun of the surprise. Their half of the battle was out of joint at the beginning, and it was never gotten right during that day. They were making desperate efforts to retrieve their lost ground when Bragg's disciplined tornado burst upon them. The shock was met gallantly but in vain. Another bloody grapple was followed by another retreat of the Federals, and again ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... he said this, than, with the suddenness of a tornado, the wind came rushing down upon them; at first, without a drop of rain, but so fiercely that the horses were forced from the track. Again and again it seemed hopeless to drive against it. The lightning flashed more vividly ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... an eloquent speech in behalf of freedom or not, his was one never to be forgotten by those who heard it. Those who had heard Mr. Garrison oftenest, and had known him longest, were astonished. It was an effort of unequaled power, sweeping down, like a very tornado, every opposing barrier, whether of sentiment or opinion. For a moment, he possessed that almost fabulous inspiration, often referred to but seldom attained, in which a public meeting is transformed, as it were, into a single individuality—the orator wielding ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... rather live in our temperate climate than between the tropics; for everything connected with the elements is so outrageously violent, that I should be continually in a state of alarm, and in constant dread of a hurricane, a tornado, an earthquake, or ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... dawn, it burst upon them—the memorable hurricane of the 14th November, which did such appalling damage on shore and at sea. Not a tent remained standing on the plateau. The tornado swept ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... as if no one had ever set foot there before. I dragged the boat up beyond, as I thought, the reach of the sea, and started to hunt for food and water. I found enough berries and things to keep me alive, but not enough to stock my boat for another cruise. A week after I landed there was a tornado, and when it cleared off and I had recovered from my fright—for the trees were blown down like rushes, and I thought my last day was come—I found that the boat was washed away. I was mightily disheartened at this, and after much thinking ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... by the tornado which passed through the western part of our county on the first of July last, created in the minds of many a desire to have a full account of the movement, conduct, and origin of the storm cloud, together with such scientific explanation ...
— A Full Description of the Great Tornado in Chester County, Pa. • Richard Darlington
... wood in front of the British works, which extends several miles west from the Miami, and had taken a position rendered almost inaccessible to horse by a quantity of fallen timber which appeared to have been blown up in a tornado. They were formed in three lines, within supporting distance of each other; and, as is their custom, with a very extended front. Their line stretched to the west, at right angles with the river, about two miles, and their immediate ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... Apocalypse is regarded by most expositors as the Roman empire, in a state of comparative quiet. As no tornado like this described has ever happened, its correspondence must be sought for in the political relations of the empire. There is great unanimity among commentators respecting the period and the agents here symbolized,—that it refers to the invasions of the Goths and other barbarians, from A. ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... not the only effect of this sudden tornado. King Krewl was blown out of his throne and went tumbling heels over head until he landed with a bump against the stone wall of his own castle, and before he could rise a big Ork sat upon him and held him pressed flat to the ground. Old Googly-Goo shot up into the air like a rocket ...
— The Scarecrow of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... of a word has reacted upon and modified its spelling. Thus it may have been with 'hurricane.' In the tearing up and hurrying away of the canes in the sugar plantations by this West-Indian tornado, many have seen an explanation of the name; just in the same way as the Latin 'calamitas' has been derived from 'calamus,' the stalk of the corn. In both cases the etymology is faulty; 'hurricane,' originally a Carib ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... the roar of a high wind. By and by Jason imagined that he could distinguish words, but very confusedly, because each separate leaf of the tree seemed to be a tongue and the whole myriad of tongues were babbling at once. But the noise waxed broader and deeper until it resembled a tornado sweeping through the oak and making one great utterance out of the thousand and thousand of little murmurs which each leafy tongue had caused by its rustling. And now, though it still had the tone of a mighty wind roaring ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... hammock, and walk to the edge of the stream, and there, after glancing round him with eager eye and air, he laid down his rifle, and stepping on to a tree which debouched into the stream (lying as it had been struck down by a tornado), he crouched down at the end of it, and commenced laving himself with the water. His appearance was romantic, and there is no doubt, from his dress, he was a warrior of some note, probably following his wife, one of the squaws captured by the volunteers ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... face looked into pale face, and tremulous voices asked as to what was coming. Fear and consternation were in all hearts. It was too late for any to seek refuge or shelter. Ere the startled multitudes had stirred from their first surprised position, the tempest came down in its fury, sweeping, tornado-like, from West to East, and then into one grand gyration circling the whole horizon. Men lost courage, confidence, and hope. They stood still while the storm beat down, and the fearful work of destruction ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... hold? Where were the German lines? And just what had been the effect of this five hour tornado ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... can be moved anywhere on the disk of the sun; so that if the observer sees a tornado begin, he moves the slit along with it, measures the length of its tract and velocity. With the telescope, micrometer, heliostat, and spectroscope came desire for more complex instruments, resulting in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... her own feelings took her up, like a tornado, and made her seem a wonderful actress. In the scene where Norma is tempted to kill her children, she fixed her indignant gaze full upon Fitzgerald, and there was an indescribable expression of stern resolution in her voice, and ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... came amid a flash of bayonets and a sudden charge of the colonials, before which the Turks broke and fled amid a perfect tornado of shells from the ships. They fell back sullen and checked, but not yet defeated, but for the remainder of the day no big attack was pressed home, and the colonials gained some ground by local counter-attacks, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... life. Before White Fang could spring in and deliver the fatal stroke, and just as he was in the act of springing in, Collie arrived. She had been out-manoeuvred and out-run, to say nothing of her having been unceremoniously tumbled in the gravel, and her arrival was like that of a tornado—made up of offended dignity, justifiable wrath, and instinctive hatred for this marauder from the Wild. She struck White Fang at right angles in the midst of his spring, and again he was knocked off ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... pulse in the keen fight with the wind, whose violence was almost equal to that of a tornado, and the familiar faces of the bright stars above me, I felt as a blessed relief. I ran not knowing whither, and when I halted, the square outline of the house was lost in the alder bushes. An uninterrupted plain stretched before me, like a vast sea beaten flat by the force of the gale. As ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... main trunk; and the three still standing are bare poles and broken wreckage. Until one visits the spot one can have no conception of the wholesale destruction that the hurricane has wrought; until he looks on the huge rosy-hearted branches he cannot guess the tremendous force with which the tornado had fallen upon that "sable ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... letter, containing a liberal enclosure, to the person into whose merciless hands he was about to commit him. In the meantime, it is impossible to describe the confused character of his feelings—the tempest, the tornado of passions, that swept through his ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... sweep across it; a river, I can sail beyond it; a storm, I can rise away above it; a torrent, I can skim it like a bird! I can advance without fatigue, I can halt without need of repose! I can soar above the nascent cities! I can speed onward with the rapidity of a tornado, sometimes at the loftiest heights, sometimes only a hundred feet above the soil, while the map of Africa unrolls itself beneath my gaze in the great ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... Lige broke in; "I think I'd ought to be hanged for letting him out of my sight. Maybe it's all right; maybe he turned and started right back for town—and got there. But I had no business to leave him, and if I can I'll catch up with him yet." He went to the front door, and, opening it, let in a tornado of wind and flood of water that beat him back; sheets of rain blew in horizontally, in ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... distance was too great to permit of sound travelling to the observers, but it lent enchantment to the view to the extent of rendering the human beings there like moving flowers of varied hue. Presently there was a motion, as if a tornado had suddenly burst upon the flower-beds and scattered them right and left in dire confusion—not a few appearing to have been blown up into ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... boys!" cried the prostrate ruffian, who had lost a tooth and bled freely at the nose. The other two prepared to pile, when the schoolmaster faced one of them, and kept him off. It is hard to say how matters would have gone, had not a tornado entered the bar room in the shape of Timotheus. How he did it, no one could tell, but, in less than two minutes, the two standing bullies and the prostrate one were all outside the tavern door, which ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... to Nick, a little resentfully. "I who speak to you say that there is four foot on each side of ze bateau. Too much tafia, a little too much excite—" and he made a gesture with his hand expressive of total destruction; "ze tornado, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... certain sense of comprehending sacrifice that more than all else is France to-day, the true France. This, and not the empty forts, not even the busy guns, was the wall that defended France, this line of men. If it broke there would come thundering down again out of the north all the tornado of destruction that had turned Northeastern France into a waste place and wrecked so much of the world's store of the beautiful ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... a tiger, one hand was clutching a date-tree, and the other hand clinging to the back of a stuffed leopard, it must have been difficult for her to keep her balance; her platform seemed very shaky, and the date-tree waved as if it had been in a tornado. The natives who followed her were more beaded and feathery and multicolored than the Africans, ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... with a distribution as wide as that, would not acceptably, I should say, have so specialized in the rare substance called "marsh paper." There'd have been falls of fence rails, roofs of houses, parts of trees. Nothing is said of the occurrence of a tornado in northern Europe, in January, 1686. There is record only of this one substance having fallen ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... the pumpkin pine. In a twinkling the three shingles of thought are transformed into fishes of thought in a stream into which the hermit and the philosopher gently and reverently wade, without scaring or disturbing them. Then, presto! the fish become a force, like the pressure of a tornado that nearly wrecks his cabin! Surely this is tipsy rhetoric, and the work that can stand much of it, as "Walden" does, has a plus vitality that ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... with trembling, pitiful fingers touched the velvet muzzle. Then suddenly indignation, fierce, overwhelming, headlong, swept over her, crowding out even her horror. She stood up and faced Nap in such a tornado of fury as ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... 21, 1914, the Belgians could stand the tornado of death no longer. The demoralized troops fled from the trenches, leaving the gap between forts Cognelee and Marchovelette open. The Germans then opened fire on the forts. In comparison with the new German siege howitzers, the old-fashioned ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... a tornado of shoes—one, aimed with dexterous violence by that unlucky Bobby, goes nigh to cut the bridegroom's left eye open, as he ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... in palpitating submission to his will. She could hear his heart beating like a rising tempest, and the force of his passion overcame her like a tornado. His kisses were like the flames of a fiery furnace. She felt stifled, shattered by his violence. But in the room beyond she still heard that steady voice reading aloud, and it kept her from panic. She knew that she ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... descended on this very spot probably within a few days; I say descended, for the whole circumference of the circle devastated did not exceed twenty yards at most. One other tree, yet fixed in the soil, presented an awful example of the might of the tornado. It was a chestnut of the largest size, the trunk near the base being seven or eight feet in circumference; it reclined at what seemed to have been the very focus of the whirlwind; its roots yet clung to earth; but, through the resistance thus offered, the tree ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... own blood, an' then it goes mad and becomes a killer. An' that's what I fear, Kate. So far I've kept Dan from ever havin' a single fight, but I reckon the day'll come when someone'll cross him, and then there'll be a tornado turned loose that'll ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... signal revolution. To some the subject is strange and uncouth; to several, harsh and distasteful; to the relics of the last Parliament it is a matter of fear and apprehension. It is natural for those who have seen their friends sink in the tornado which raged during the late shift of the monsoon, and have hardly escaped on the planks of the general wreck, it is but too natural for them, as soon as they make the rocks and quicksands of their former ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... spiral, its gyrating sides streaked with intermittent flashes. Its volcanic roaring and rapid return to land was a signal for vain flight—the miserable lover knew it to be the flamboyant ether of the pyromaniac transformed into a trumpeting tornado. And he hoped that it would not spare him, as this phantasm twirled and ululated in the heavens, a grim portent of the iron wrath of the Almighty. In a twinkling it had passed him, high in the dome of heaven, only to erase in a fabulous blast the moaning multitude. And ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... he went, and struck like a brain-controlled tornado at whatever crossed his path. But irreparable damage had been done before the old school was relieved, and Byng—like others—was terribly short of men. Many of his own irregulars were so enraged at having been ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... that ends to-day has been marked with severity it has also been distinguished by goodness. If chastisements have come to us as individuals, families, communities, and as a nation; if the earthquake, and the tornado, and the conflagration, have combined to teach us our dependence on the Supreme Being—all these should be esteemed as ministers of the Highest to teach us that we are pensioners upon the infinite bounty of the Almighty; that in our prosperity ...
— 'America for Americans!' - The Typical American, Thanksgiving Sermon • John Philip Newman
... to clear away a boat!" shouted Wilder, without pausing to think of the impossibility of one's swimming, or of effecting the least good, in so violent a tornado. ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... clutch me for her prey. Then my mother came, and seizing the pillars of the portico, bent them like reeds: an earthquake shook the hills—great sheets of woodland slid roaring and crashing into the valleys—a tornado swept through the temple halls, which rocked and tossed like a vessel in a storm: a crash—a cloud of yellow dust which filled the air—choked ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... rain-drift. How we dragged through two more days, while the gale raved with unabated fury, I do not know. Poor Eric was for rushing into the blinding whirl, that turned earth and air into one white tornado; but he could not see twice the length of his own arm, and we prevailed on him to come back. On the third night, the wind fell like a thing that had fretted out its strength. Morning revealed an ocean of billowy ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... of the battle of elements. It pounced upon the blinding smoke-cloud and swept it from its path and plunged to the heart of the conflagration with a shriek and roar of cruel delight. One breath, like the breath of a tornado, and its boisterous lungs had sent its mischief broadcast in the flash of an eye. With a howl of delight it tore out the blazing roof of the house, and, lifting it bodily, hurled it like a molten meteor against the dark walls of ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... the size of the planet and its continents, they seemed quite small, and the continents themselves were comparatively level. They also noted that spray was blown in vast sheets, till the ocean for miles was white as milk. The wind often attained tornado strength, and the whole surface of the water, about what seemed to be the storm centre, frequently moved with rapidity in the form of foam. Yet, notwithstanding this, the waves were never as large as those to which they were accustomed ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... Red Murdock's greeting as the Elliott warriors lurched drunkenly into the clubhouse for their precious ten minutes of rest. The players eyed him soberly, chests heaving, shirts mud-grimed and torn, bodies sore and weary from blocking the path of the Delmar tornado. And Red Murdock, looking them over, felt how hollow would be the saying of another word. He devoted attention instead to treating their various minor hurts and giving an encouraging slap here and there to the back of a man whose shoulders inclined ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... feet, his arms hanging loose at his sides. The Battler swung forward on his toes for another rush. He tried to lift his hands. They were like dead things. He tried to run out of the way of that tornado of blows and he tottered back against ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... happened on the second day, as the storm was at its height. There had come a great crash at the window, and we saw something white that struggled on the sill outside; Sir Adrian opened the casement (when we had a little tornado of our own inside, and all his papers began dancing a sarabande in the room), and we gathered in the poor creature that was hurt and battered and more than half stunned, opening alternately its yellow bill and its red eyes in the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... through soft pine. Just when you are beginning to wonder if he has converted himself into a catherine-wheel or a corkscrew, he straightens himself out horizontally, remains poised for the millionth part of a second like a he-angel that has moulted his wings; then down he dives perpendicularly like a tornado in trousers, skinning forehead, nose, and chin as he kisses the drum-like surface of the hide. No, on the whole, I do not consider it healthy to try to fool with a married woman in a Boer fighting laager, apart altogether from the moral aspect of the affair. If some of the amorous dandies ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... from the former in an emergency was a serious task in the twelfth century. Moreover, Kyoto was devastated in 1177 by a conflagration which reduced one-third of the city to ashes, and in April of 1180 by a tornado of most destructive force, so that superstitious folk, who abounded in that age, began to speak ominously of the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his —these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey. Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of Flask to that whale, as he called the fictitious monster which he declared to be incessantly tantalizing ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... roar of the pit and the fountain of lava had sunk to a low murmur, but ahead of them they now heard a rushing sound like a distant tornado. ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... of birds. Dung several inches thick covered the ground. Many trees two feet in diameter were broken off at no great distance from the ground, and the branches of many of the tallest and largest had given way, as if the forest had been swept by a tornado. ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... A tornado of confusion swept whirling from wall to wall and the madness of the moment seized irresistibly upon Presley. He forgot himself; he no longer was master of his emotions or his impulses. All at once he found himself upon the stage, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... impossible for the Germans to keep their front line supplied with ammunition or food, the carriers of which were obliged to pass through a tornado of shells and machine gun bullets while crossing the Valley of the Ailette, where their every movement could be observed by the French. Eventually the position became untenable and the Germans retired during the night to the Northern ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... from Barnacho, for a cruise; but, some days after he was out, a violent tornado overtook him, which separated him from his consort, and, after two days' distress, threw his sloop upon a small uninhabited island, near the bay of Honduras, where she staved to pieces, and most of her men were drowned: Vane himself ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... their husbands, the musicians' wives hung around the building pestering the officials. Pobloff has been found, they were informed, in a solitary fit, on the floor of the auditorium. The stage was in the greatest confusion—chairs and music stands being piled about as if a tornado had visited the place. Not a musician was there, and with the missing was Luga, the harp-player. A thousand wild rumors prevailed. The men, tired of tyrannical treatment, brutal rehearsals and continual abuse, had risen in a body and thrashed their leader; then fearing arrest, fled ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... and the mother country, it was in a back room of the tavern that the adherents of the crown met to discuss matters. The landlord himself was a amateur loyalist, and when the full cloud was on the eve of breaking he had an early intimation of the coming tornado. The Sons of Liberty had long watched with sullen eyes the secret sessions of the Tories in Master Stavers's tavern, and one morning the patriots quietly began cutting down the post which supported the obnoxious emblem. Mr. Stavers, who seems not to have been belligerent himself, ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... raree show. No, by the Living! but, fast as they neared us, we still kept our thunders close bearing upon them, like infernal pointers at a dead set; and as soon as they were come within point blank shot, we clapped our matches and gave them a tornado of round and double-headed bullets, which made many a poor Englishman's head ache. Nor were they long in our debt, but letting go their anchors and clewing up their sails, which they did in a trice, they opened all their batteries, and broke ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... a perfect tornado of brine into air, glistening; it ricochetted twice, and plunged into the dunes. A ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... is at the time of the Taiping Rebellion—the old power and spell of the National Capital as a military centre had really vanished. Though in ancient days horsemen armed with bows and lances could sweep like a tornado over the land, levelling everything save the walled cities, in the Nineteenth Century such methods had become impossible. Mongolia and Manchuria had also ceased to be inexhaustible reservoirs of warlike men; the more adjacent portions had become commercialized; whilst the outer ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... sitting with a clouded brow, Lucia was troubled by nothing less than a raging tornado of agitated thought. Though Olga would undoubtedly be a great addition to the musical talent of Riseholme, would she fall into line, and, for instance, "bring her music" and sing after dinner when Lucia asked her? As regards ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... aver that this calamity so colossal in its proportions and awful in its character is a judgment upon our sister city for its great wickedness. I heard similar declarations when Chicago was swept by its tornado of flame. Neither Chicago nor San Francisco could claim to be pre-eminent in righteousness, but, that Divine Providence should visit the vials of His wrath in an especial manner upon them because of their iniquity, is utterly repugnant both to reason and Holy Scripture. Only by a special ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... lugger is riding out the tornado. Whirled one moment this way and another that, now and again taking in water, her forest-shelter breaks the force of many a gust that would have destroyed her out in the open. But in the height of the storm her poor substitute for an anchor lets go its defective ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... his opponent cried out angrily, "Keep your hands for pounding on your Bible, don't be sticking them in my face." One day in a game against the Scrub, Cowan had passed everyone except the fullback and was bearing down on him like a tornado, when within a few feet of the fullback the latter jumped aside and said politely, "Pass on, sir, pass on." Cowan played on two winning teams, '85 ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... his self-command, affected unconcern and, instead of getting up, only shifted his pose to a sitting position, took off his shoes and stockings, and proceeded to bathe his feet. But it was as if a blazing fire had been kindled in his breast, and a tornado had been ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Anthony Wayne; gentleman, soldier, statesman, patriot. "Mad," "Dandy," "Black Snake," "Tornado." Angry with traitors—Neat-Courageous—Irresistible. None can study his life without feeling the nobleness of his character. Courtly in manners, honorable to a degree, high in aspirations, unselfishly for country, magnanimous in victory, loyal to authority, affectionate to family, pure ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... know but little still. The hurricane does not come unheralded to our shores, the freezing grip of a cold wave is forecast in time to enable us to fight it, the lightning is tamed by the metal finger we thrust upward to the sky. But the tornado sweeps its funnel of death over our cities in spite of all we do, the cloudburst falls where it will, and rivers rush to flood with the melting of the snows ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... of life, still I have been compelled to note that the world is full of evils for which I can see no remedy, and as a matter of common experience they apparently never are remedied. Good steering and careful seamanship are immensely important; but of what use are they if one is caught in a tornado or maelstrom, or wedged in among rocks, so that going to pieces is only a question of time? Good seamanship ought to keep one from such a fate, it may be said. So it does in the majority of instances; but often the wisest are caught. If you will realize it, Miss Burton, all in this house, men, women, ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... as that tornado we encountered in Africa," observed Sam, as he crouched close to his brothers. "Don't you remember it and how the lightning struck ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... in the street, head pointing north—dazed. A bomb crashed through the eaves and tore a hole as big as a small cellar in the street directly before the old castle, bursting with the concussion of a tornado. For a few moments I sat on the street feeling weak in the legs and ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... the great outside world we're parsimonious, recognising the fact that the coronation of King Edward VII. is a matter of much less import to our community than the holocaust which was responsible for the destruction of Sir Higginbottom's new hen-house. Similarly a West Indian tornado involving losses running up into hundreds of thousands of dollars sinks into relative insignificance as compared with the local weather forecast and its probable effect on crops not worth ten thousand; while the enforced abdication of the Sultan of Turkey gets a "stick" (a space ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... nothing of the agony which, like a wild tornado, was desolating the fair face of her child's whole being. She saw nothing beyond the portals of that cold and sullen aspect, and the sight filled her ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... 1918, for the Allied forces, it looked dark. The Germans were able to neglect the crumbled-in Eastern Front and concentrate a tornado drive on the Western Front. It was at last realized that the controlling Bolshevik faction in Russia was bent on preventing the resumption of the war on the Eastern Front and possibly might play its feeble remnants of military forces on the side of the Germans. The Allied Supreme ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... and he stopped before striking out over one of the naked stretches of the plain,—a white waste swept by the blasts that sucked down through a gorge of the mountain, and flattened the snow-drifts as the tornado flattens the waves. Across this expanse ran the road, its stiff lines obliterated here and there, in the slight depressions, and showing dark along the rest ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... tornado of fire, and drifted forward on a broken moor, already littered with dead and wounded. Both Companies eventually lined up in shallow depressions of ground, but there was no trench ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... diatribe, tirade, screed, philippic, invective, rhapsody, plea. Spruce, natty, dapper, smart, chic. Stale, musty, frowzy, mildewed, fetid, rancid, rank. Steep, precipitous, abrupt. Stingy, close, miserly, niggardly, parsimonious, penurious, sordid, Storm, tempest, whirlwind, hurricane, tornado, cyclone, typhoon Straight, perpendicular, vertical, plumb, erect, upright. Strange, singular, peculiar, odd, queer, quaint, outlandish. Strong, stout, robust, sturdy, stalwart, powerful. Stupid, dull, obtuse, stolid, doltish, sluggish, brainless, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... seems to hold sway in the passions of the affections. Love is blind and seems to completely subdue and conquer. It often comes like a clap of thunder from a clear sky, and when it falls it falls flat, leaving only the ruins of a tornado behind. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... though, fully armed for his battle of life, he had suddenly been stripped of armour and every weapon, and left naked on the field. But he had the mind of the gamester, and the true gamester's self-control. He had taken chances so often that the tornado of ill-luck ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... fathomless moat of the sea; and the dependence of it—for what is that island but an atom dotting watery space and so easily cut off from communication with the world at large? Drought may visit the islander, and he may be starved; the tornado may desolate his shore; fever and famine and thirst may lie in wait for him; sickness and sorrow and death abide with him. Thus is ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... had assumed his stereotyped expression of calm attention under this tornado of questions, motioned Joseph to place a chair for the young lady. But Miss Fosdyke shook her head and ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... the little figures, fascinated; they stood for some vast and tremendous force outside, which could not be controlled or even comprehended,—some merciless, annihilating force, like the lightning or the tornado. And he had put himself at the mercy of it; it might do its will with him! "Tr. C. 59 5/8" read the little pasteboard; and he had only six points of safety. If at any time in the day that figure should ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... small tornado, Charlotte descended the long, straight stairway only to sink in a heap on the broad step at the bottom. "Oh, dear!" she said, her chin in her ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... imputed to him the grossest corruption and most ravenous greed for money. He remarked:—"He is changeable in every thing but corruption; there, and only there he is systematic, methodical, immutable. His revenge is furious as a tempest, or a tornado; but his corruption is a monsoon; a trade-wind, blowing uniformly from one point of the compass, and wafting the wealth of India to the same port, in one certain direction." In his speech, however, in indulging his wit and irony, Sheridan ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... feet, when it was freighted on the wings of the winds and borne away in clouds. The fearful rumble and confusion attending it were as the sound of distant artillery, the rushing of many horses to battle, or the roar of a fearful tornado. It commenced to act at 2 P. M., and continued for an hour and a half, the latter part of which it emitted little else than steam, rushing upward from its chambers below, of which, if controlled, there was enough to run an engine of wonderful power. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Rouge, who, in his futile though praiseworthy attempts to make himself useful used always to intermeddle with cooking the dinners. Delorier's disposition knew no medium between smiles and sunshine and a downright tornado of wrath; he said nothing to Tete Rouge, but his wrongs rankled in his breast. Tete Rouge had taken his place at dinner; it was his happiest moment; he sat enveloped in the old buffalo coat, sleeves turned up in preparation ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... had been dealt it by the storming columns of the conquistadors. The horse transformed the Utes, Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos from snapping-turtles into condors. Thenceforward, instead of crawling in slow and feeble bands to tease the dense populations of the pueblos, they could come like a tornado, and come in a swarm. At no time were the Moquis and their fellow agriculturists and herdsmen safe from robbery and slaughter. Such villages as did not stand upon buttes inaccessible to horsemen, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... between the pages of Captain Blaise's book of verse I drew another sheet. At that time I would have been ashamed to let anybody else see these things, but I did not mind her. "Here," I said, "is one I felt. One night in the Caribbean we were caught in a tornado, and we thought—Captain Blaise said afterward he thought so too—that we had stood our last watch. And at the height of it—we could do nothing but stand by—one of the crew, a young fellow—I was only sixteen years old myself then—said ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... towards a new school. The sobriety and tenderness of his colouring gives a sense of harmony, and reconciles us to his repetitions of large vegetable forms, which remind us sometimes of a kitchen-garden in a tornado. For domestic decoration we should, as far as possible, adhere to reposing forms and colours. Our flowers should lie in their allotted spaces, quiet and undisturbed by elemental struggles, which have no business in our ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... up and looked around him on the pitiable ruins of the camp on which a tornado could not have wrought more destruction. Something lay glittering in the moonlight close to him. He picked it up. It was his shaving-glass, the most fragile thing in all their belongings, yet unbroken. Tent-poles had been smashed to matchwood, cooking utensils trodden flat, guns ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... afterwards, it showed the ineffaceable lineaments of its wild paternity: it was a pleasant and kindly race of men, but capable of savage fierceness, and never quite restrainable within the trammels of social law. They were strong, active, genial, cheerful as the sunshine, passionate as the tornado. Their lives were rendered blissful by ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cried Emma, as they came within sight of it. Not a vestige of the camp was left. Logs lay about everywhere, some almost standing on end. Young trees were broken off short, bushes laid flat as if a tornado had swept over the scene, and here and there the trunks of giant trees were scarred where the bark had been torn off by logs coming ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... attempt to make the mouth of the Hoogly, caught by an adverse current, through what seemed to be a very trifling miscalculation, and she was cast aground as quickly as though blown on a lee shore by a tornado. We passed her as we went in, with both her anchors out, adopting various nautical expedients to get afloat. As the accident occurred on a rising tide, we have no doubt that she finally got ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... tornado, the wind took a leap of more points of the compass than I can tell. Barnes, the fisherman, said how many; but I might be quite wrong in repeating it. One thing, at any rate, was within my compass—it had been blowing to the top of its capacity, direct from the sea, but now it ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... 1794, on the banks of the Maumee, near a rising ground called Presque Isle, about two miles south of the present Maumee City, and four miles from the British Fort Miami. The place was called Fallen Timbers because it was covered with trees blown down long before in a tornado. These formed a natural stronghold for the savages, but Wayne had every other advantage, especially in numbers; he had almost twice as many men, well drilled, armed, and clothed, while the miserable and disorderly army of St. Clair had fallen a prey to a far greater force ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... until the derangement is sufficient to cause the necessary tension, when all obstacles are rent asunder, and the ether issues forth, clothed in the power and sublimity of the lightning. It is a fearfully-energetic fluid, and, when sufficiently disturbed, competent to produce the most violent tornado, or the most destructive earthquake. That these two phenomena have simultaneously occurred, seems well authenticated; but the earthquake, of course, must be referred generally to derangements of the electric equilibrium of the earth's interior, ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... estimation. By the 13th we reckoned ourselves off Cape Palmas, and by the 22d we were by our reckoning abreast of Cape Mount, 30 leagues west from the river Sestos or Sestro. The 1st March we lost sight of the Hind in a tornado; on which we set up a light and fired a gun, but saw nothing of her, wherefore we struck sail and lay by for her, and in the morning had sight of her 3 leagues astern. This day we found ourselves in the latitude of Cape Verd which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... and rain was followed by a moment of calm. Then a blast of wind, which scraped over the cabin roof, was succeeded by the suck of the tornado, which swept, a waterspout, across the river a quarter of a mile down stream, struck a sandbar, and carried up a golden yellow cloud of dust, which disappeared in the gray blackness of a terrific ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... he entered the jail and found that the jailer could speak French, he broke out in a perfect tornado of enthusiasm. "Je serai charm, de lier connaissance avec un si amiable compagnon," said he, and continued in a strain so swift and unabated that it would have been impossible for an Englishman to have ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... became excessively oppressive. The sky was always dark and the rain never ceased. Sometimes a rift was seen in the clouds in the distance, it would rapidly increase in size, taking a funnel shape, and then a tornado would burst, like a tempest in miniature, lasting only three or four hours, but of extraordinary violence. During one of these the Belle-Poule had to scud along under bare poles at the rate of twelve knots an hour. The weather was excessively unhealthy, but in the whole course ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... and she hid from him behind the light garrulity of Mrs. Cafferty, through which now and again, as through a veil, she saw the spike of his helmet, a wiry bristling moustache, a surge of great shoulders. On these ghostly indications she heaped a tornado of words which swamped the wraith, but she knew he was waiting to catch her alone, and would certainly catch her, and the ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... The seven-spearing sun, The sword of separation before our love is done; Even for us, A simian shape Throwing seven souls on the sea-wet cape; Even for us Who smile mouth to mouth, The full tornado from the seven-forked south; Even to us Who clasp with our knees, The scattering upheaval of the ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke
... when the shadows of the early evening crept into the corners of the room. He had carried her across the flooded slew again after the big rain. They had relived a dozen moving incidents by flood and field. Jennie recalled the time when the tornado narrowly missed the schoolhouse, and frightened everybody in ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... savages concealed, as usual, that it was forced to fall back. The enemy had chosen their ground with great judgment, taking a position behind the fallen timber,[11] which had been prostrated by a tornado, and in a woods so thick as to render it impracticable for the cavalry to act with effect. They were formed into three regular lines, much extended in front, within supporting distance of each other, and reaching about two miles; and their first effort was to turn the ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... embodied space, that knows No changes in its reign, Save when the fierce tornado throws Its barren sands, like drifted snows, In ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... fresh footfall on the garden walk, a quick, rapid, decided one. Somebody burst open the hall-door, and, without shutting it, dashes into the parlour, accompanied by a tornado of damp air, and announces in a loud though not unpleasant ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... in the bow of the long-boat, as if someone had suddenly struck him, broke into a tornado of blasphemy. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... closed the door. He ran homeward through the rain, the storm which soaked him to the skin being but a trifle compared to the tornado in his breast. ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln |
