On Cyclones.

I desire to state that my position as United States Cyclonist for this
Judicial District is now vacant. I resigned on the 9th day of September,
A.D. 1884.

I have not the necessary personal magnetism to look a cyclone in the eye
and make it quail. I am stern and even haughty in my intercourse with men,
but when a Manitoba simoon takes me by the brow of my pantaloons and
throws me across Township 28, Range 18, West of the 5th Principal
Meridian, I lose my mental reserve and become anxious and even taciturn.
For thirty years I had yearned to see a grown up cyclone, of the
ring-tail-puller variety, mop up the green earth with huge forest trees
and make the landscape look tired. On the 9th day of September, A.D. 1884,
my morbid curiosity was gratified.

As the people came out into the forest with lanterns and pulled me out of
the crotch of a basswood tree with a "tackle and fall," I remember I told
them I didn't yearn for any more atmospheric phenomena. The old desire for
a hurricane that would blow a cow through a penitentiary was satiated. I
remember when the doctor pried the bones of my leg together, in order to
kind of draw my attention away from the limb, he asked me how I liked the
fall style of Zephyr in that locality.

I said it was all right, what there was of it. I said this in a tone of
bitter irony.

Cyclones are of two kinds, viz: the dark maroon cyclone; and the iron gray
cyclone with pale green mane and tail. It was the latter kind I frolicked
with on the above-named date.