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More "Tornado" Quotes from Famous Books



... says, "the bird is little more than a drift of the air, brought into form by plumes," the particular bit shaped into the form we call the orchard oriole must be a breath from a Western tornado, for a more hot-headed, blustering individual would be hard to find; and when this embodied hurricane, this "drift" of an all-destroying tempest, goes a-wooing, strange indeed are the ways he takes to win his mate, and stranger ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller

... canvass. At the beginning of the picturesque and emotional "log cabin canvass of 1840," Mr. Van Buren, with his keen insight into popular movements, had said, in somewhat mixed metaphor, that it would be "either a farce or a tornado." The present canvass gave promise on different grounds of similar alternatives. General Grant had been tried, and with him the country knew what to expect. Mr. Greeley had not been tried, and though the best known man in his own field of journalism, he was the least ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... was 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. ...
— The Scarecrow of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... that particular shade of feeling. The next movement is one of the most astounding ever conceived. Beginning like an airy scherzo, presently a march rhythm is introduced, and before one has realised the state of affairs we are in the midst of a positive tornado of passion. The first tunes then resume; but again they are dismissed, and it becomes apparent that the march theme is the real theme of the whole movement—that all the others are intended simply to lead up to it, or to form a frame in which it is ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... blow missed him also, but the third caught a small shrub that grew twenty feet beyond the dying fire. The shrub snapped off under the blow, and its branchy end smote the wolf across the head and neck. As if struck by a tornado he was hurled into the air, and curtailed and indirect though the blow was, he sprawled down stunned and insensible in the grass. The bear paused one instant; then ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall

... disappeared, it became apparent that the entire forlorn hope would perish before morning if exposed to the cold and storm. W. H. Eddy says the wind increased until it was a perfect tornado. About midnight, Antoine overcome by starvation, fatigue, and the bitter cold, ceased to breathe. Mr. F. W. Graves was dying. There was a point beyond which an iron nerve and a powerful constitution were unable to sustain a man. This point had been reached, and Mr. ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan

... volutation[obs3], circination|, turbination[obs3], pirouette, convolution. verticity|, whir, whirl, eddy, vortex, whirlpool, gurge[obs3]; countercurrent; Maelstrom, Charybdis; Ixion. [rotating air] cyclone; tornado, whirlwind; dust devil. [rotation of an automobile] spin-out. axis, axis of rotation, swivel, pivot, pivot point; axle, spindle, pin, hinge, pole, arbor, bobbin, mandrel; axle shaft; gymbal; hub, hub of rotation. [rotation and translation ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... twilight, full of mystery and wildness, with vast stretches of thirsty plains and bleak mountains around which the storms, unbroken by forests, shrieked in the "straight winds" of many days, or whined the threat of the deadly tornado. And suddenly it became a land of high noon, garish and crude, but wide-awake and striving with all the tireless energy of ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis

... 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 ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths

... army, had proceeded but a few miles, when a fire so severe was aimed at it by the 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 ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... the wildest storm, he told her, and the bellowing of mountainous waves combined, would be but a murmur compared with the far-reaching thunder of a sun hurricane as it swept along hundreds of times faster than clouds are ever driven by an earthly tornado. There was nothing in her nature which led her to share in his almost fierce delight in the far-away disturbances, and he suddenly stopped and said kindly, "Vy I vrighten you mit sooch pig gommotions? You shust von leedle schild off a voman; und I likes you pegause ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... since been within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. On the 31st day of October last, while sailing under the flag of the United States on the high seas, she was forcibly seized by the Spanish gunboat Tornado, and was carried into the port of Santiago de Cuba, where fifty-three of her passengers and crew were inhumanly, and, so far at least as relates to those who were citizens of the United States, without due process of law, put ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... them the terrible destructive fires that spread and spread and seemingly never are extinguished. No, I think that the force used is something of the nature of an atom-disrupting triad of beams and that these set up the column as a veritable tornado, a whirling column of roaring wind rushing skyward with tremendous velocity. The first ships, I believe, were carried into the stratosphere and captured intact ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... if a tornado had whirled through the vast, low-ceilinged kitchen. Heavy tables lay on their sides and upside down, their legs in the air. Most of the crockery—fortunately, so Blanche said to herself, kitchen crockery—off the big dresser lay smashed in large and small pieces ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes

... on the home run. There is a great hubbub, like the roaring of a tornado, as they sweep under the line, yellow ahead. You swing your hat, and yell as loud as you can. You are ten thousand in. Oh, it is just the jolliest excitement a man ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin

... unbidden. A blind ungovernable impulse 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

... dare to thrash him if he were big enough to thrash you back," Angelica shrieked, waltzing round like a tornado; "and it isn't fair to thrash him and not me, for I am much worse than he is. You know I am, papa! and I shall hate you if Diavolo is thrashed, and teach him how to make your life a burden to you for a month, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... thundering like peal came the mad rush of waters. No sooner had the cry been heard than those who could with a wild leap rushed from the train and up the mountains. To tell this story takes some time, but the moments in which the horrible scene was enacted were few. Then came the tornado of water, leaping and rushing with tremendous force. The waves had angry crests of white and their roar was something deafening. In one terrible swath they caught the four trains and lifted three of them right off the track, as if they ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... 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 ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... 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 loose upon us with ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... what seemed an interminable period, while the Queen blushed scarlet, the Princess burst into tears, and the hundred guests sat aghast. The Duchess said not a word until the tirade was over and the company had retired; then in a tornado of rage and mortification, she called for her carriage and announced her immediate return to Kensington. It was only with the utmost difficulty that some show of a reconciliation was patched up, and the outraged lady was prevailed ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... has a chance to note from an advantageous position the development of a tornado observes that in a tolerably still air, or at least an air unaffected by violent winds—generally in what is termed a "sultry" state of the atmosphere—the storm clouds in the distance begin to form ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... there is a 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

... wiping her eyes and proceeding to cast out even articles of apparel that were imperative necessaries. And in her zeal, when she had finished with her own, she attacked the belongings of her men and went through them like a tornado. ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London

... 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

... to advance. Recollect that I am in the habit of sleeping on the field of battle." The fugitives, reanimated by the arrival of the reserve, immediately rallied in their rear. The double charge in front and flank was instantly made. The Austrians were checked and staggered. A perfect tornado of bullets from Desaix's division swept their ranks. They poured an answering volley into the bosoms of the French. A bullet pierced the breast of Desaix, and he fell and almost immediately expired. His last words were, "Tell the First Consul that my only regret in dying is, to have perished ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott

... veia subir desde lejos, me dio una gran voz advirtiendome que no tomara la senda de la tia Casca, si queria llegar sano y salvo a la cumbre. La verdad era que el camino, que equivocadamente habia tornado, se hacia cada vez mas aspero y dificil y que por una parte la sombra que ya arrojaban las altisimas rocas, que parecian suspendidas sobre mi cabeza, y por otro el ruido vertiginoso del agua que corria profunda ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... 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, ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar

... 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 and advantages ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... suppose. Directly above me came a crash of thunder. A few moments later I found myself lying 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 unable ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green

... 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 ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams

... in Cuba travels like a tornado, and distorts like a convex mirror, poisons the mind of Cachita's parent, Don Severiano, and one sultry afternoon, Cachita's black maid, Gumersinda, brings me a billet-doux from her young mistress, which fills me with alarm. Don Severiano knows all—more than all—and ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman

... acting very reasonably up to now. But now he flung himself out the door like a tornado. It echoed behind him. Marjorie did not try to keep him. She sat still for a minute longer, shivering. Then she began to cry. She certainly did not want him for her husband, but equally she did not want him to go off and leave her. So she went over to the davenport ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer

... chums crossed the glade and made for a series of rocks looming between the trees beyond. The wind was now blowing with almost tornado force, and with it came a few scattering drops of rain. Just as they gained the rocks something ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer

... from the air-currents with which 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... shore-scenery is individualized,—as, for instance, the Needles, the Eddystone, the Three Chimneys, the Hen and Chickens, the Bishop and Clerks. The strange atmospheric phenomena, especially of the tropics, have been christened by the Spaniard and Portuguese, the Corposant, the Pampero, the Tornado, the Hurricane. Then follows a host of words of which the derivation is doubtful,—such as sea, mist, foam, scud, rack. Their monosyllabic character may only be the result of that clipping and trimming ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... An Alberta election was coming. It came. When it was all over Alberta was in the grip of the Agrarians. Liberalism by constituencies was swept out as clean as a barn floor at fanning-mill time. And Michael Clark sat down to think it over. He had half expected that tornado. But he refused to like it. The farmers had stolen his own programme of free trade and by means of it had stampeded his Province for the sake of using it as a spring-broad to make the grand jump ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... and convulsions; I have the Evil Eye, the Evil Hand; A touch from me and they are weak with pain, A look from me, and they consume and die. The death of cattle and the blight of corn, The shipwreck, the tornado, and the fire,— These are my doings, and they know it not. Thus I work vengeance on mine enemies Who, while they call me ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... elevating his tail, put forth all his speed. And such speed! Talk of a deer, the wind, or a steam-engine—their gait is not to be compared with it. Nothing in nature I have ever seen run—except, it may be, a Southern tornado, or a Sixth Ward politician—could hope to distance that pig. He gained on the horse at every pace, and I soon saw that my dollar ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... lieutenant said, two hours later, "that one of your wishes is going to be fulfilled. There is a cloud rising very rapidly on the larboard bow, and from its colour and appearance it seems to me that we are going to have a tornado." ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty

... great 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 ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... Like birds before a tornado, the people scattered to the right, to the left,—this way, that, and were gone. Donny found himself, dazed and alone, upon the cross-ties, groping toward the oncoming train. He thrust out his hands and stood a moment piteously crying, "Papae! Papae!" the most bewildered little fellow ...
— A Lost Hero • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward and Herbert D. Ward

... quietly. He shook his feet out of the stirrups. A number of brown hands and arms shot forth to help him. Domini turned back into the cabaret. She heard a tornado of voices outside, a horse neighing and trampling, a scuffling of feet, but she did not glance round. In about three minutes Androvsky joined her. He was limping slightly and bending forward more than ever. Behind the counter on which stood the absinthe bottle was ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... to have saved a man, but rather at getting rid of him. If you received news that a tornado had caught your ship and sunk it with every soul on board, what joy it would give you! You are not thinking of the flour-trade with its profits and losses, but that every year in the swamps of La Plata and the river Amazon that fearful ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... the east shines red. Can it be that the morn shall fulfil My dream, and refashion our clay As the poet may fashion his rhyme? Hark to that mingled scream Rising from workshop and mill— Hailing some marvelous sight; Mighty breath of the hours, Poured through the trumpets of steam; Awful tornado of time, Blowing ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop

... She was small and colorless. Her husband, a wild explorer, a tornado of a man, had been killed by a buffalo. She was afraid that Zora took after her father. Her younger daughter Emmy had also inherited some of the Oldrieve restlessness and had gone on the stage. She was playing now ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... start for Bikoro under a threatening sky. It is indeed soon apparent that a tornado is crossing the Lake towards us, for great banks of dense clouds advancing rapidly from the south west now obscure the sun. It would be impossible to travel through the storm, so we turn the boat and make for a creek which bounds Ikoko on the east. Only just in time, we reach a native hut, ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman

... done—for the skipper had always behaved like a father to him—lost the last vestige of his self-control, and became in a moment the very personification of a raving, bloodthirsty maniac. Levelling his still smoking revolver at Bligh, he commanded the latter, with a very tornado of curses, instantly to place the body of the captain in the longboat and shove off from the ship's side forthwith, unless he wished to share ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood

... 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 ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... deal with. A man who has been trained to cope with storms, to foresee their coming, and to minimise their consequences, may be pardoned if he feels a certain reluctance to measure himself against a tornado. ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... my torpid 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 ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... 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 art unsought ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... were iced from corner to corner with frozen 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 drifts, crusted over by the frozen ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... the official narrative says: "The Thetis came first steaming into a tornado of shells from great batteries ashore. All her crew save a remnant who remained to steam her in and sink her, already had been taken off her by a ubiquitous motor launch. The remnant spared hands ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... month brings to the Cape the August twister and the August tide. The twister seems to be a simultaneous rushing in of tornado-like winds from every quarter and a whirling bluster of elements gone mad. And in that month the high tide is the highest in ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... to-day, and it touches great art. I never hear it even now on the street organ without a certain pleasure—a pleasure mingled with pain, for its happy lilt comes weighted with the tremendous emotions of those unforgettable days. It is like a butterfly caught in a tornado, a catch of song in the throat ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... is asserted that the Revolution was a tornado of murder; cruelty was let loose, and the Atheists waded in blood. Never was greater nonsense paraded with a serious face. During the Terror itself the total number of victims, as proved by the official records, was less than three thousand; ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... are jogging home to England. I resist myself for duty's sake: that I can do. But if the squire were here with his yea and his nay, by heavens! I should be off to the top of the Rhine like a tornado. I submit to circumstances: I cannot, and I will not, be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... rushing at Merry like an unleashed tornado. McGurvin, too, was plunging toward him from the right. Sam and Turkeyfoot were making Clancy ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish

... argue like a tornado with Monsieur Cazalet, but you think I must be talked to like this country's jeune fille a marier. Isn't he perverse, Mr. Asticot? I think I am quite ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... 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 ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... were walking thus silently, when they reached a portion of the wood where, for a short distance, it was perfectly open, as if it had been totally swept over by a tornado. In this they were about entering, when, brought in relief against the moon-lit sky beyond, the form of an Indian was seen standing as motionless as a statue. At first sight, the form appeared gigantic in its ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis

... Meade's disposition is summed up when we are told that she is "good at having presentiments—after things happen." What cleverer embodiment of innate obstinacy than in Isabella Spencer—"a wisp of a woman who looked as if a breath would sway her but was so set in her ways that a tornado would hardly have caused her to swerve an inch from her chosen path;" or than in Mrs. Eben Andrews (in "Sara's Way") who "looked like a woman whose opinions were always very decided ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... "Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases" is pronounced by an authority to have great historical value; he was one of the founders of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences; and in the numerous list of his writings one comes upon such oddly assorted subjects as an account of a tornado in Wethersfield, a cure for cancer, upon white-washing, the mental arithmetic of a negro, on winds, upon female education, on the decomposition of white-lead paint, a dissertation on the supposed change in the temperature of winter, upon names of streets in New York, on yellow fever, on the age ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder

... In what tropic tornado, or on what coral-key of the Bahamas, months ago, to judge by those barnacles, had that tall ship gone down? How long had that scrap of wreck gone wandering down the Gulf Stream, from Newfoundland into the Mid-Atlantic, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... tone that gushes from its tiny throat. Not a gem can repose safe from seizure, in the rocks, in the sand, or in the torrent. Not a star can twinkle in the abyss of night, but science will tell its rate of light, and describe its silent and mysterious orbit. Torrid heat, the earthquake, the tornado, the pestilence, mountains of ice, craters of flame—science will dare them all, to know one more law of nature. God speed the daring of science, if only her votaries will not place the law in the place of Him who made both it and the works which it was commissioned to guide. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... the wren, as I know of no other bird that so throbs and palpitates with music as this little vagabond. And the pair I speak of seemed exceptionally happy, and the male had a small tornado of song in his crop that kept him "ruffled" every moment in the day. But before their honeymoon was over the bluebirds returned. I knew something was wrong before I was up in the morning. Instead of that ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... 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 unavoidable, and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... 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

... later came a gust of wind that almost lifted them from their feet. The trees of the forest were bent lower than ever, and amid the whistling of the tornado came a crack like ...
— Four Boy Hunters • Captain Ralph Bonehill

... We were all divided except mother and my little brother, who remained together. My sister remained with one of the rebels, but was tolerably treated. We all fared very well; but it was only the calm before the rending tornado. Captain T. was Captain of the boat to Memphis, from which the Union soldiers had rescued us. He commenced as a deck hand on the boat, then attained a higher position, and continued to advance until he became her Captain. At length he came in possession of slaves. Then his accomplishments ...
— The Story of Mattie J. Jackson • L. S. Thompson

... say of the Napoleon of Mr. Turner? called (with frightful satire) "The Exile and the Rock Limpet." He stands in the midst of a scarlet tornado looking at least forty feet high. "Ah!" says the mysterious poet from whom ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... swiftness of a 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 ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard

... the tornado; all our guns give tongue together, St. Barbara for the gunnery and God defend the right— They are stopped and gapped and battered as we blast away the weather, Building window upon window to our lady of the light; For the light is come on Liberty, her foes are ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various

... and the Moslem chief urged on their rowers to the top of their speed. Their galleys soon shot ahead of the rest of the line, driven through the boiling surges as by the force of a tornado, and closing with a shock that made every timber crack, and the two vessels quiver to their very keels. So powerful, indeed, was the impetus they received, that the pasha's galley, which was considerably the larger and loftier of the two, was thrown ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... half an hour we watched the horizon, scarcely believing that its strange hue was not really the reflection of a fire in the woods, till, with a report as of a thousand cannon crashing on all sides, and the fierce blast of a tornado, the storm was upon us. It spent itself, however, in that one blast; the red light gradually paled and died, stars peeped through the riven clouds, and the muttering thunder rolled away to ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon

... the rock. The horses are dead tired and this wind is making them nervous. There's a storm due as soon as it lays a bit, and we would be sort of protected here. A tornado's a giant out ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter

... wound was very startling. No longer was the lion a shrinking fugitive, disgusted at having been disturbed before his meal of the previous night had been digested, and only anxious to get to some other hiding place. Now he was a tornado of fury with flaming eyes, gleaming teeth, and erect mane. Emitting short, coughing thunder-growls of wrath, he charged straight for the one who had ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully

... 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

... to tell the story of how the stricken giant, raving in outer darkness, this Polyphemus who had gouged out his own eye, this Hercules self-invested in the poisoned robe of Nessus, moved heaven and earth to see her again. It was an earthquake, a tornado, a nightmare. He had frenzies of tears, his nights were sleepless reviews of his folly in throwing her away, and vain phantasms of her eyes and lips. He poured out torrents of telegrams and letters, in which cries of torture mingled with minute legal instructions. The correspondence ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... among the tangled branches. But their surviving comrades do not falter. On,—on,—creeping, crawling, climbing over the obstructions, unterrified, undaunted, with all the energy of life centred in one effort; like a tornado they sweep up the slope,—into the line of fire, into the hissing storm, up to the logs, into the cloud, leaping like tigers, thrusting the bayonet home upon the foe. The ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin

... me the wink and goes on. Made me sick. I turned to Suds, and the fool hadn't batted an eye. Never even heard of Donnegan. You know how it is? Half the road never heard of it; part of the roads don't know nothin' else. He's like a jumpin tornado; hits every ten miles and don't bend a ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand

... I said. "Took them on single-handed, rassled them for a fall and made the capture. He is a one-robot tornado, a power for good in this otherwise evil community. And he's bulletproof too." I ran a finger over Ned's broad chest. The paint was chipped by the slugs, but ...
— Arm of the Law • Harry Harrison

... 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

... message from Gladys. Then began a race the like of which I have never seen before. It was the speed of man matched against the speed of the storm gods. Behind us the storm was breaking; we could see the grey wall of the rain in the distance; the wind was rising to a tornado and the thunder claps seemed to split the earth open. And there we were, scudding along before it, like a tiny craft fleeing from a tidal wave. The Glow-worm bore us onward like a gallant steed, and I compared our headlong flight with the King of Denmark's ride when his Rose of the ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey

... all, a tornado that has swept across the Gardens, and rooted up all these trees, but merely the firm that has taken the contract for the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various

... wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions, the wild, tempestuous outbursts of grief from the soul. I bathed Mrs. Lincoln's head with cold water, and soothed the terrible tornado as best I could. Tad's grief at his father's death was as great as the grief of his mother, but her terrible outbursts awed the boy into silence. Sometimes he would throw his arms around her neck, and exclaim, between his broken sobs, "Don't cry so, Mamma! don't cry, or you will make ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley

... being the leading one, when an earth-shaking rumble was felt and heard, and suddenly the head-of-column was struck by one of the terrible tornadoes for which this region is famous, and utterly annihilated. The tornado, I believe, passed along the entire length of the road back to the ford, dispersing or destroying our entire army; but of this I cannot be sure, for I was lifted from the earth insensible and blown back to the south side of the river. Continuous firing all night on the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... before us fled Indian and Tory, yager and renegade, Greens, Rangers, Highlanders, officers galloping madly, baggage-wagons smashed, horses down, camp trampled to tatters and splinters as the vengeance of Tryon County passed in a tornado of fury that cleansed the land forever of Walter Butler and his ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers

... moments the storm was upon them; first a tornado of wind, then intense and almost continuous lightning, followed by heavy rolling thunder. Edith Chase trembled, and buried her ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March

... I early pinned my faith to organized charity as just orderly charity, and I have found good reasons since to confirm me in the choice. If any doubt had lingered in my mind, my experience in helping distribute the relief fund to the tornado sufferers at Woodhaven a dozen years ago would have dispelled it. It does seem as if the chance of getting something for nothing is, on the whole, the greatest temptation one can hold out to frail human nature, whether in the slum, ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis

... marketplace was situated round the tree, which became the great fetish tree of the town, under which human sacrifices were offered. On the 6th, the day upon which Sir Garnet sent his ultimatum to the king, a bird of ill omen was seen to perch upon it, and half an hour afterwards a tornado sprang up and the fetish tree was levelled to the ground. This caused an immense sensation in Coomassie, which was heightened when Sir Garnet's letter arrived, and proved to be dated upon the day upon which ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty

... from the continent it looks like an immense single mountain that has floated out to sea. It is visible during clear weather (and particularly sharply visible in the strange clearness you get after a tornado) from a hundred miles to seawards, and anything more perfect than Fernando Po when you sight it, as you occasionally do from far-away Bonny Bar, in the sunset, floating like a fairy island made of gold or of amethyst, I cannot conceive. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... had 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 ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... WHEN the tornado had swept on, leaving in its wake a wide path of bare ground fringed with wreckage, the little girl hurried home to assure herself that her mother and the big brothers had gotten into the storm-cellar, and that the blue mare was unhurt, and to gaze into the sitting-room mirror to see if ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates

... a certain amount of anxiety concerning the coming of that summer storm. It would be only natural that he should; for if the aeroplanes were ever caught in the sweep of the furious tornado they would be as straws, to be toppled over and over to the ground ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy

... year, and vast numbers have their health permanently impaired, on account of inclement weather, to which they are exposed by exclusion from public conveyances. And this merely on account of complexion! What a tornado of popular eloquence would come from our public halls, if Austria or Russia were guilty of any despotism half as mean! Yet the great heart of the people is moved by kind and sincere feelings in its outbursts against foreign tyranny. But in addition to this honorable ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child

... mathematical law winds the leaves around the stem and the planets round the sun. The same law of crystallization rules the slight-knit snow-flake and the hard foundations of the earth. The thistle-down floats secure upon the same summer zephyrs that are woven into the tornado. The dew-drop holds within its transparent cell the same electric fire which charges the thunder-cloud. In the softest tree or the airiest waterfall, the fundamental lines are as lithe and muscular as the crouching haunches ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... eventually disappeared, and the skipper said, 'We have just missed it.' A few days afterwards we came into the Mauritius, and the first thing we saw was a great vessel in the ports, her iron masts twisted and torn just like hairpins, Evelyn. She had been caught in the tornado, a great three-masted vessel.... We should have gone ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore

... 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 side of the Ailette Valley. The best elements ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... at morning. And now I was in the midst of a whirl and a roar—a confused babbling at the base of Babel's tower. And as I walked up a street I thought that a tornado had broken loose and that I was in the center of it. I called a hackman, for my reading taught me what to do, and I told him to drive me to the Rookery. He rattled away and came within one of being upset by other vehicles, and ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read

... should cast loose and each sail on her own account, as at this time of the year the south-west monsoon, which takes the place of the north-eastern 'kizkasi,' as it is cabled, or Indian trade-wind, generally sets in with a violent tornado blowing from ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson

... Renaissance corresponds roughly with the life of Erasmus (1466-1536); from the days when Northern scholars began to win fame for themselves in reborn Italy, until the width of the humanistic outlook was narrowed and the progress of the reawakened studies overwhelmed by the tornado of the Reformation. The aim of these lectures is not so much to draw the outlines of the Renaissance in the North as to present sketches of the world through which Erasmus passed, and to view it as it appeared to him and to some of his contemporaries, famous or obscure. And firstly of ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen

... he'd send up the treasure. It was a great scheme, but they never got a chance to try it. If he ever gave any signal they never heard it, for down there a man's voice strained to its shrillest would be no more than a whisper against a tornado. You can believe that, can't you, from the way it roars and ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... would much 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

... has been standing comes the most unexpected and heart-jumping crash! Instantly the jungle all about roars into life. The great bodies of the alarmed beasts hurl themselves through the thicket, smash! bang! crash! smash! as though a tornado were uprooting the forest. Then abruptly a complete silence! This lasts but ten seconds or so; then off rushes the wild stampede in another direction; only again to come to a listening halt of breathless stillness. So the hunter, unable to see anything, and feeling ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... the blackness of nothing— that awful nothing, whose outside ring vibrated with fearful flames; the fiery cherubim, winged, taking all possible shapes, and unformed living shapes. A human flamed and changed and vanished. The tornado of whirling, flashing, chaotic life swirled and drove through the darkness of chaos of nothing from nothing—and that great, unknown abyss is God! But ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... herself in a passion of hysteria face downward on the bed and a tornado of weeping swept over her. Rooted, he stood as though face to face with an immense dawn, but with eyes that ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... A tornado of artillery fire had swept over it, and of the houses nothing was left but indecencies, shattered walls and naked rafters, beneath which were choked heaps of household furniture, broken beds, battered lamps, ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... as 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 disbanded at a moment's notice that they refused to return to him. ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... the library, they relapsed into utter silence. As the clock struck ten, however, a knock was heard at the door, then whisperings, and the rustle of female attire, and lastly Madame de Bois Arden burst upon them like a tornado. ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau

... women ran out of the room and up the stairs. Celia, lying on the settee, heard all the quiet of the house change to noise and confusion. It was as though a tornado raged in the room overhead. Furniture was tossed about and over the room, feet stamped and ran, locks were smashed in with heavy blows. For many minutes the storm raged. Then it ceased, and she heard the accomplices clattering down the stairs without a thought of the noise they made. They ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason

... glance, but no verbal response. It was readily to be seen that she was terrified by the violence of the mountain tornado. As if to shame him for the frivolous remark, she suddenly changed her ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... "As the tornado approached, the trees seemed to fall like a pack of cards before its irresistible current. After passing through the clearing made around the village, the force of the wind gradually abated, and in a ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... other brandishes the sword of the country. Myriads of dependants and partisans, scattered over the land, are ever ready to sing hosannas to him, and to laud to the skies whatever he does. He has swept over the government, during the last eight years, like a tropical tornado. Every department exhibits traces of the ravages of the storm. Take as one example the Bank of the United States. No institution could have been more popular with the people, with Congress, and with State Legislatures. None ever ...
— Henry Clay's Remarks in House and Senate • Henry Clay

... 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 upon the ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler

... demonstrate the persistent, self-denying and constant devotion to culture in France. Times may be peaceful or stormy, seasons may prove disastrous, the withered, thin and blasted ears of corn may devour the seven ears full and golden, the ship of State may be caught in a tornado and lurch alarmingly—all the same "the man in the street," "the rascal many," to quote Spenser, will have a museum in which, with wife and hopefuls, to spend their Sunday afternoons. The local museum is no less of a ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... awaited washing, he decidedly dutifully to remain at home, though possibly he might take the air, and probably the beer, of Heliopolis in the evening. However, his good intentions were ruthlessly upset, for at that moment the interior of his desert domicile was swiftly converted into a swirling tornado of dust and dirt. Blankets, towels and hay departed upwards, and all was turmoil. In five seconds the air was calm again, but not so the eight inhabitants ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie

... cattle, the neighing of horses, the howling of dogs, and the strange notes of distress and fright from other domestic animals, strangely blending with the roar of the flames and the thunder of the tornado, beggars description. ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman

... boy in a Sunday-school book. He was so untrustworthy that very soon no one was willing to associate with him. He stole from his father, and, after graduating, went to prison for forgery and finally was killed by a tornado. There was still another, a great fat fellow, who always seemed to be half asleep, and was very shortly run over and killed by a locomotive. Yet if we could know the whole truth in regard to these persons it might be difficult to decide how much of their ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... N. Y. Herald gives some interesting facts regarding these scourges of the air. While the cyclone, as we have shown, may have a diameter of hundreds of miles, the track of a tornado is often limited to a few hundred feet, and rarely has the width of ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis

... pastor concluded his prayer, when the wind veered round, and soon a violent gale was blowing off shore. In the teeth of the wind, the ships could make no headway. The gale increased in violence until it rivalled in fierceness a tornado. The sea was lashed into fury, and great waves arose, on the crests of which the men-of-war were tossed about like fragile shells. The coal-ship which had been captured was so racked and torn by the heavy seas, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... and truths, both comprehensible and incomprehensible, by the same means. We are as competent to testify of that which we do not comprehend as we are to testify of the most ordinary fact. As competent to bear testimony to the fact of a sweeping tornado as to the fact of a gentle breeze. As competent to bear testimony to the fact that water freezes and becomes hard as to testify to the truth of its being a fluid. As competent to testify to a fact that we never before experienced as to one that we have. Without this competency no man could be ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880

... army, came rushing on like the sweep of the tornado, and plunged, as a thunderbolt of war, into the camp of the Austrians. For a few hours the battle blazed as if it were a strife of demons—hell in high carnival. Eighteen thousand Prussians were mowed down by the Austrian batteries, before the fierce assailants ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott

... chill smilingly, but Fyne stooped at once to release the dog. He was some time about it; then simultaneously with his recovery of upright position the animal passed at one bound from profoundest slumber into most tumultuous activity. Enveloped in the tornado of his inane scurryings and barkings I took Mrs. Fyne's hand extended to me woodenly and bowed over it with deference. She walked down the path without a word; Fyne had preceded her and was waiting by the open gate. They passed ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... him up to wonder, to praise, and adore. The forked and blinding lightning which, with the rapidity of thought, dissolves the union between the body and the soul; the pealing thunder, announcing that the bolt has sped; the fierce tornado, sweeping away everything in its career, like a besom of wrath; the howling storm; the mountain waves; the earth quaking, and yawning wide, in a second overthrowing the work and pride of centuries, and burying thousands ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... into Martial's room like a tornado. "I think you must certainly have gone mad, Marquis," he exclaimed. "That is the only valid excuse you ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau

... along with that cat—some sort of a patent machine; cost thousands of dollars—and he was expecting to examine it; and Green had an idea he'd lift out a dead cat and take in the stakes. When all of a sudden, as she came pelting down, a tornado struck her—now, Maria, what in the thunder are you staring at me in that way for? It was a tornado—a regular cyclone—and it struck her and jammed her against the lightning-rod on the Baptist church-steeple; and there she stuck—stuck on that ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)

... stretched out at the gallop, the buffalo began to run—at first heavily, as if great speed were impossible to them; but gradually the pace increased until it attained to racing speed. Then the hunters gave the rein to their eager steeds, and the long line rushed upon the game like a tornado of centaurs. ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne

... an occasion was the whirlwind of the war. Here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair-weather sailor; the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four years,—four years of battle-days,—his endurance, his fertility of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the centre of a heroic epoch. ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... "starting point" to await the report of the Patrol under Lieut. MacRobert, who also had charge of the tape-laying party which included Corporal Chapman. At 9.30 p.m. our artillery suddenly opened on the enemy's salient, and poured down on it such a tornado of steel as the Germans had never experienced before. For twenty minutes our shells flayed the German front line, and under this arch of shrieking explosives the battle party crawled right up to the rim of the bombardment. What wire remained uncut was blown to fragments by ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various

... which was in excellent order, showed no signs of the tornado which had passed through it, and Jackson Pepper, looking vaguely round, was dimly reminded of those tropical hurricanes he had read about which would strike only the objects in the path, and leave ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs

... They determined to brand their faction with impotence in eternal black and white. They delivered their challenge with the insolence and malignity of their progenitors of the Penal Days, and the result was such a tornado of national feeling as never shook the Irish capital before; a tornado before which the pigmies who raised it are shivering in affright. Magnificent as are the results in Ireland, however, our countrymen in England have achieved the real marvels of the campaign. ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various

... ancient custom; and then when he gave still further proof of childish incompetency by telling the Tiers Etat they were "not to meddle with the privileges of the higher orders," kingship had become a mockery. It was a child telling the tornado not ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele

... after a terrific Tornado and Thunder and Lightning, that frightened some of our Tailors and Haymakers half into Fits, we came to an Anchor in 22-fathom water, in a sandy bay off the land of Brazil. Caught some Tortoises for their Shells, for they have too strong a taste to ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... tornado and an idiot you must think me! I cannot explain my extraordinary departure. I suppose I was in such a nervous state that I was obsessed in some mysterious manner and went off like a rocket. I ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... fought, they never 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 ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke

... spirit in a caravan: so he consents to an explanation, saying sententiously, "My little wife is mad." The fact is, his two helpmates, one young and one old, are vastly too much for him, as they would be for most men. He moves along in a perpetual family tornado. The mother of the young one, a sort of derwish negress, is a tremendous old intriguer, and stirs up at least one feud a day. Quarrelling is meat and ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson

... I had gone to sleep, at two o'clock suddenly something in the nature of a tropical tornado flew up and struck us hard. I was awakened by a tremendous crash on the bridge-deck above my cabin, a heeling over of the ship that nearly dumped me out of my berth, and what seemed like a solid spout of water pouring in through my open weather porthole, with the wind howling a devil's ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... the dispensations of Providence point; and to produce it, all his judgments are inflicted: the promises and the threatenings have each a similar design, and will ultimately promote the same general object. The tempest and the tornado have their peculiar uses, as well as the small rain that descends upon the tender herb. "Mercy and truth meet together—righteousness and peace ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox

... 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 me—blinded ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... officers,—for all felt a spirit of mischief after the last night's adventure,—when, just as we had fairly swung out into the stream and were under way, there came, like the sudden burst of a tropical tornado, a regular little hail-storm of bullets into the open end of the boat, driving every gunner in an instant from his post, and surprising even those who were looking to be surprised. The shock was but for ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... over his 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 that ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler

... brought the result to be expected. The two thoroughbreds plunged forward with snorts of indignant protest, answered by Apache's very plebian squeal of rage as he shook his bony little head and struck into a gait such as Beverly had never dreamed a horse could strike. It was like a tornado let loose, and, expert little horsewoman that she was, she found ample occupation for all her wits and equestrian skill, though she managed to jerk out as ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... many of them continuing for years, and producing ruin and desolation. Under our present system, to talk, as a general rule, of well-regulated banks, is to talk of a well-regulated famine or pestilence, or of a well-regulated earthquake or tornado. And even the few banks that are claimed to be well managed, have no appreciable effect on the system. It is the system that knows no uniformity or security, and never can have, as now organized. That a system so perilous and explosive, should ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... 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 ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston

... 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 gave vent to some sallies, which showed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... to the good brig Avon after parting company, as aforesaid, with her consort, the Hyperion; a circumstance that I regret not a little, as it deprives me of my only chance for describing a storm at sea. They only experienced one tornado, and fifteen gales of wind, before joining the other ship. The tornado was no great things after all—the brig ran merrily before it, under a reefed foresail and close-reefed main-topsail. The crew were all on deck during the whole night it lasted, in case of their services ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... stations on board the leading Japanese ships. "But," he added, "after the first twenty minutes they seemed suddenly to go all to pieces, and their shooting became wild and almost harmless." No wonder that under such a tornado of explosions, death and destruction, and with their ships ablaze, and range-finding and fire-controlling stations wrecked, the gunnery of the Russians broke down. One of the pithy sayings of the American Admiral Farragut was: "The best protection against the enemy's fire is ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... 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 music, it was possible that she might be almost too great an addition, ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... year, tornado second. If next year's a failure, we'll go back—if we can raise money enough to go with. Three times and then out!" said ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... my breath as the artillery of a fleet vomited forth its fire, and rent the air with sudden concussions—I have heard the roar of the tumbling river of the Canadas, and I have stood aghast at the crashing of a forest in a tornado;—but never before did I feel so life-stirring, so thrilling an emotion of surprise, alarm, and sympathy, as that which arose within me, at the burst of commendation and delight with which this announcement of ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... Shrondo, Park mentions that on the 12th of June, in consequence of a very sudden tornado, they were forced to carry their bundles into the huts of the natives, being the first time that the caravan had entered a town since leaving the Gambia. Considering the climate and season, this slight circumstance is alone a sufficient proof of the hardships which ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park

... was heard a continuous, steady, low-keyed, advancing hum, like the rushing of wild horses, their hoofbeats lost in one mighty, throbbing, tumultuous roar; then a deeper darkness fell upon the scene, and swift as the swoop of an eagle the tornado ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland

... 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, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various

... ever finds out about that pigs' foot ease, she will make you think your trousers are warmer than your hair. You strike me as being a boy that resembles a tornado. No one knows when you are going to become dangerous, or where you are going to strike. You and a tornado are a good deal like a cross-eyed man; you don't strike where you look as though you were aiming, and suddenly you strike where you are not looking, and where nobody is looking for you ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck

... felt the violence of the destructive hurricanes which occasionally ravage the West Indies. They often combine the features of a tornado and a cloudburst, and while the furious whirlwind wrecks houses, uproots trees and strips forests bare of leaves, the accompanying severe rains swell the streams to abnormal height and cause extensive ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... moment, checked by the look in her face, then went blindly on: "And you've got Blackfoot in you, too; and you just felt your way through the tornado and over the blind prairie like a, bird reaching for the hills. It was as easy to you as picking out a moverick in a bunch of steers to me. But I never could make out what you was doing on the prairie that terrible day. I've thought of it a hundred times. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... fleet horses, with flaunting pennons, hair streaming in the wind, and uttering demoniac yells, came down like the sweep of the tornado upon the animals. Their object was to cause a stampede, that is, to throw the animals into such a panic that they would break away from everything, and follow the Indian horses off into the boundless prairie. The trappers thus left without any steeds, ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott

... called, and he came to her. She drew from under the apron a cocked pistol, and, pointing to Francisco, pushed it into his hand. At the sight the alley was cleared as suddenly as if a tornado had swept through it. Malpete's guests leaped over fences, dived into cellar-ways anywhere for shelter. The door of the woodshed slammed behind Francisco just as his old rival reached it. The maddened man tore it open and dragged him out by the throat. He pinned him against the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... picked up out of your three-meals-a-day life, whirled around in a tornado of events, and landed in a situation so grotesque and yet so horrible that you laugh even while you are groaning, and straining at its hopelessness? McKnight says that is hysteria, and that no man worthy of the ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... the valley he heard a loud rushing noise be hind him, and looking around he beheld a tornado. The air was filled with logs and uprooted trees, borne along by the great storm. It came nearer and seemed to be advancing to destroy him. He was terrified and cried out to the storm: "Ciyèïcçe, Dsilyi' Neyáni. Quaïláçi?" ("'Tis I, Reared Within the Mountains. Who art thou?") The tempest ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews

... through the forests of Yucatan, heard his Maya Indian guide exclaim in awe-struck tones, as the roar of a tornado made itself heard in the distance: He catal nohoch yikal nohoch tat, "Here comes the mighty wind of the Great Father." As Dr. Brinton points out, this belief has analogues all over the world, in the notion of the wind-bird, ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... down the stony road, some distance from the cottage, in the very face of the coming tornado, her heart beating like a trip-hammer, her eyes bent on the little light up the mountain-side, before it occurred to her that this last flight was not only senseless but perilous. She even laughed at herself for a fool ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... a rope down to him and he'd send up the treasure. It was a great scheme, but they never got a chance to try it. If he ever gave any signal they never heard it, for down there a man's voice strained to its shrillest would be no more than a whisper against a tornado. You can believe that, can't you, from the way it roars and tears ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... the little clouds are coming up fast," and I pointed to the horizon, where some small clouds were rising up and which were, as I knew from experience and constantly watching the sky, a sign of a short but violent gale, or tornado, of which we usually had one, if not two, at this season ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat

... the 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 ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... where unsuspected she has been standing comes the most unexpected and heart-jumping crash! Instantly the jungle all about roars into life. The great bodies of the alarmed beasts hurl themselves through the thicket, smash! bang! crash! smash! as though a tornado were uprooting the forest. Then abruptly a complete silence! This lasts but ten seconds or so; then off rushes the wild stampede in another direction; only again to come to a listening halt of breathless stillness. So the hunter, unable to see anything, and feeling very small, ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... spaceship Sam Collins was on crashed right into his house. Ed Michaels recalled a time in a tornado when Sy Baxter's car was picked up, lifted across town and dropped into his ...
— The Last Place on Earth • James Judson Harmon

... 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

... were quietly engaged in their various industrial pursuits, dreaming probably of no danger, until the advance of this army, coming upon them mysteriously, no one knew whither, like a plague, or a tornado, or a great conflagration, drove them from their homes, and sent them flying about the country in all directions in terror and despair. The prince enjoyed the credit and the fame of being a generous and magnanimous prince. But his generosity ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... calamities, or other ills of life. Those who suffer feel themselves selected as victims, and they ask, Who has done this to us, and why? Often people who are not victims interpret a natural incident by egoistic reference. This is done not on account of the destruction wrought by an earthquake or a tornado, but from pure terror at what is not understood, e.g. an eclipse.[440] Pilgrimages and crusades were cases of mania and delusion. The element of delusion was in the notion of high merit which could be won ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... brick, and I don't mean to offend you. Today has been terrible, you know: this tornado has swept me from my moorings. I don't know where ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... monster I descended about fifteen metres, and flung six bombs at it. The sixth struck the envelope of the ship fair and square in the middle. There was instantly a terrible explosion. The displacement of the air round about me was so great that a tornado seemed to have been produced. My machine tossed upward and then flung absolutely upside down, I was forced to loop the loop in spite of myself. I thought for a moment that the end of everything had ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... California, arrived with soldiers and recruits en route for California 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 17th of July. Without a sign preliminary to the execution of ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... fishing-parties "down the bay," had for barometer only a broken affair that had been issued to advertise the virtues of a certain baking-powder. It was roiled permanently to the degree marked "Tornado." ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day

... 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, I would ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the mighty storms, which wildly toss its giant branches in the air, and which serve only to exercise the limbs of the sturdy tree, whose roots deep intertwined among its native rocks, enable it to bid defiance to anything short of a whirlwind or tornado. ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... phenomenal success as a cavalry leader, he was a picturesque and familiar figure to friend and foe alike, as in his broad cavalier's hat, his gold-bedizened jacket, and high cavalry boots, with his long hair streaming in the wind, he would ride like a tornado, to the accompaniment of "Garry Owen," his favorite battle-air, carrying all before him—a subject worthy the pencil of a Vandyke, the very type of the dashing trooper of romance. But that there was a method in his dash and a practical element in his daring, even the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... A week ago a strange thing happened when she was giving an impromptu concert. She was singing the Jewel song from Faust so ringingly that the Chinese snipers must have heard it, for immediately they opened a heavy "fire," which grew to a perfect tornado, and sent the listeners flying in terror. Perhaps the enemy thought it was a new war-cry, ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... twilight can not disguise the evidences of a terrible "sea-change." Not a trace of paint or gilding remains on the wave-worn, shattered timbers. Sails rent and cordage strained tell tales of many storm-gusts, or, perchance, of one tornado; and see! her flag is flying half-mast high: the corpse of the Pilot is on board. Let us stand aside, lest we meet the passengers as they land. It were worse than mockery to ask how the ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence

... there is little public spirit in a caravan: so he consents to an explanation, saying sententiously, "My little wife is mad." The fact is, his two helpmates, one young and one old, are vastly too much for him, as they would be for most men. He moves along in a perpetual family tornado. The mother of the young one, a sort of derwish negress, is a tremendous old intriguer, and stirs up at least one feud a day. Quarrelling is meat and ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson

... in good faith, he was plotting to separate us. We were all divided except mother and my little brother, who remained together. My sister remained with one of the rebels, but was tolerably treated. We all fared very well; but it was only the calm before the rending tornado. Captain T. was Captain of the boat to Memphis, from which the Union soldiers had rescued us. He commenced as a deck hand on the boat, then attained a higher position, and continued to advance until he became her ...
— The Story of Mattie J. Jackson • L. S. Thompson

... what she had expected. She had been prepared for tempestuous, for overwhelming, wrath. The absence of this oddly disconcerted her. Her own tornado of indignation was checked. ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... are given a piano interpretation that reaches a high plane. There is a storm prologue which suggests, in excellent harmonies, the distant mutter of the storm rather than a piano-gutting tornado. "Full Fathoms Five Thy Father Lies" is a reverie of wonderful depth and originality, with a delicious variation on the good old-fashioned cadence. Thence it works up into an immensely powerful close. A dance, "Foot it Featly," ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... Joe, Bust Connors, Burley Bo, Tornado Blackey, and Touch McCall used more imagination in rechristening themselves. Others, with less fancy, carry the names of their physical peculiarities, such as: Vancouver Slim, Detroit Shorty, Ohio Fatty, Long Jack, Big ...
— The Road • Jack London

... there were the bees, 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 ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... my mind, and I clapped my hand into my pocket and jerked out a pair of scissors. In an instant I was free. The world and the stag was before me, and I was flying along with a tornado-like swiftness that soon brought me abreast of the deer. This perfectly splendid, bounding creature was not far away from me on the other side of the hedge, and as the field was higher than the road I could see him ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton

... put in under the lee of a small island in the latitude of 16 degrees 12 minutes, of which we never knew the name, none of our charts having given any account of it: I say, we put in here by reason of a strange tornado or hurricane, which brought us into a great deal of danger. Here we rode about sixteen days, the winds being very tempestuous and the weather uncertain. However, we got some provisions on shore, such as plants and roots, and a few hogs. We believed ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe

... children whose home the Magic City would be, and how he was confident they would build it here because, in the land of terrible winds, when people commenced to erect their metropolis, they must put it where no deadly breath of cyclone or tornado could tear ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris

... bark, the tornado is past; Staunch and secure thou hast weather'd the blast; Now spread thy full sails to the wings of the morn, And soon the glad ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... under me the play of each individual muscle: his joints were so elastic, and his every movement glided so into the next, that not once did he jar me. His growing swiftness bore him along until he flew rather than ran. The wind met and passed us like a tornado. ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald

... upon Niger's back, and galloped wildly through the park. His soul was like a southern sea under a summer tornado. The slow dawn was gathering under a smoky cloud with an edge of cold yellow; a thin wind was abroad; rain had fallen in the night, and the grass was wet and cool to Niger's hoofs; the earth sent up a savor, which like a soft warp was crossed by a woof of sweet odors ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... terrific simoon burst over the desert, gathering up and dispersing the sands with indescribable fury. My mouth and nostrils were filled with earthy atoms, and my eyes were filled with irritating particles. The storm grew so dense and awful that it became a tornado, and we were soon enveloped in total darkness. All routes of travel were obliterated, and destruction threatened my command. These sand spouts are frequent, making a clean swathe, burying alike man and beast, and often they blow ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... intolerable. A second fit of madness, wilder than the first, drives the man about the town like a tornado. Finally and impressively comes the contrast between the drunkard's horrible mirth and the sudden calm in his mind when the tall pale Quakeress hypnotizes him with conviction of sin. She drives out the devils from his breast with quiet authority, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... observed by a hundred sharp eyes, eagerly seeking the whereabouts of the elusive enemy, and almost immediately every searchlight on ship and shore swept round until it rested full upon us, thereafter inexorably following our every movement, while a perfect tornado of shell and rifle-fire hissed and whined about our ears. But for this, it might have been not very difficult for us to have inflicted further damage upon the battleships and cruisers; but as it was, there was only one thing to be done, namely, to effect our escape with the utmost ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood

... the next hour or so the sky was filled with a screaming tornado of shells, rushing, bumping, and bursting, and the Bosch lines sagged, bulged, quivered, slopped over, and were spattered against the blue in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various

... Those "boys," without bayonets, their artillery shooting stones for balls, were little more than a mob. But with confidence in him, on they rush, up, over, sweeping Baume's Hessians from the field like a tornado. The figure of General Schuyler comes before us—quieter but not less noble, an invalid, set to hard tasks with little glory. His magnanimous soul forgets self in country as he cheerfully gives all possible help to Gates, his ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... pelting hail, followed by snow on the wings of a tornado, swept every spark of fire from those shivering mortals, whose voices now mingled with the shrieking wind, calling to heaven for relief. Mr. Eddy, knowing that all would freeze to death in the darkness if allowed to remain exposed, succeeded after many efforts in getting them close together ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton

... died, 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, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various

... bird, I wouldn't harm a hair of your soft head for anything. But there is a man in there, or one who passes for a man, that I think would look far more respectable if he'd come out and face the tornado. She's easy to manage when you know how. At least Mag ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes

... my attention was divided between the tornado coming up from the south and the bark approaching from the north. Not at once did the favoring wind leave the craft. Where the dead whale lay seemed to be a belt of calm between the bark and the coming tornado. And this craft in which ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster

... to pole? Should I seek the western skies, Where the giant rivers roll, And the mighty mountains rise? Or those treacherous isles that lie In the midst of the sunny deeps, Where the cocoa stands on the glistening sands, And the dread tornado sweeps! Ah! no! no! no! They have no charms for me; I never would roam from my island ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy

... 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 ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... He shook his feet out of the stirrups. A number of brown hands and arms shot forth to help him. Domini turned back into the cabaret. She heard a tornado of voices outside, a horse neighing and trampling, a scuffling of feet, but she did not glance round. In about three minutes Androvsky joined her. He was limping slightly and bending forward more than ever. Behind the counter on which stood the absinthe ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... which continued as scorching as ever, 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 ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... his comfortless lodgings aflame with bewilderment, indignation and despair. He fell upon Mrs. Buttershaw, a slatternly and sour-visaged woman, and hurled at her a tornado of questions. She responded with the glee of a hag, and Aristide learned the amazing fact that in the matter of sheer uncharitableness, unkindness and foulness of thought Beverly Stoke, with its population of three hundred hinds, could have brought down upon it the righteous indignation ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... winds the leaves around the stem and the planets round the sun. The same law of crystallization rules the slight-knit snow-flake and the hard foundations of the earth. The thistle-down floats secure upon the same summer zephyrs that are woven into the tornado. The dew-drop holds within its transparent cell the same electric fire which charges the thunder-cloud. In the softest tree or the airiest waterfall, the fundamental lines are as lithe and muscular as the crouching haunches of a leopard; and without a pencil vigorous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... 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 the invention of the photoheliograph, invoking the aid of photography ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various

... critically. I sustained the chill smilingly, but Fyne stooped at once to release the dog. He was some time about it; then simultaneously with his recovery of upright position the animal passed at one bound from profoundest slumber into most tumultuous activity. Enveloped in the tornado of his inane scurryings and barkings I took Mrs. Fyne's hand extended to me woodenly and bowed over it with deference. She walked down the path without a word; Fyne had preceded her and was waiting by ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... individualized,—as, for instance, the Needles, the Eddystone, the Three Chimneys, the Hen and Chickens, the Bishop and Clerks. The strange atmospheric phenomena, especially of the tropics, have been christened by the Spaniard and Portuguese, the Corposant, the Pampero, the Tornado, the Hurricane. Then follows a host of words of which the derivation is doubtful,—such as sea, mist, foam, scud, rack. Their monosyllabic character may only be the result of that clipping and trimming which words get on shipboard. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... which provoked a tornado of laughter and some applause. Mooings, chirpings, cacklings—there was a superb hen—neighings, he-hawing, roarings, bleatings, growlings, quackings, peepings, screamings, bellowings, and—something else, of course—set The Enormous Room suddenly and entirely alive. Never have I imagined such ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... country entered upon a remarkable canvass. At the beginning of the picturesque and emotional "log cabin canvass of 1840," Mr. Van Buren, with his keen insight into popular movements, had said, in somewhat mixed metaphor, that it would be "either a farce or a tornado." The present canvass gave promise on different grounds of similar alternatives. General Grant had been tried, and with him the country knew what to expect. Mr. Greeley had not been tried, and though the best known man in his own field of journalism, he was the least known and most doubted ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... swift-coming, stupendous thunder, and Willett stood and swung his hat, and classmates half-way down the slope turned back to see, and understood without seeing, that there was something back of it besides Willett. And then a tornado burst forth, as Harris, pale to the lips, halted at the door. His escort sprang aside, and to a man the battalion leaped to its feet and let go with voice and foot and hand, and the din was deafening. One moment he ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King

... Kieft had not 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 corn thieves." ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott

... huddled in our booby hutches (unfortunately without lamps) and congratulated ourselves on our astuteness. Soon it came, the lightning flashing, the thunder crashing, the rain pouring, and lastly the wind blowing a perfect tornado. The various jerry-built domiciles stood it well for some time, then the hutch behind us was blown down, and we in ours roared with glee; then another went, and finally the wind, not being able to get at us by a frontal ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross

... 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, ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... Clair in a thunderstorm at half-past five, but, fortunately for us, in this shallow lake, averaging only three fathoms or eighteen feet in depth, the storm, which in other places was a tornado, did nothing but frighten us ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... him on the mountain? Was it really a ghostly apparition, or a fever dream? Rudy knew nothing of fever, or any other ailment. But, while he judged Babette, he began to examine his own conduct. He had allowed wild thoughts to chase each other in his heart, and a fierce tornado to break loose. Could he confess to Babette, indeed, every thought which in the hour of temptation might have led him to wrong doing? He had lost her ring, and that very loss had won him back to her. Could she expect him to confess? He felt as if his heart would break while he thought of it, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... delirium and convulsions; I have the Evil Eye, the Evil Hand; A touch from me and they are weak with pain, A look from me, and they consume and die. The death of cattle and the blight of corn, The shipwreck, the tornado, and the fire,— These are my doings, and they know it not. Thus I work vengeance on mine enemies Who, while they call me slave, are ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... precipitous banks of the river as best they could. When a portage could not be avoided, it was necessary to carry their armor, provisions, clothing, and canoes through the forests, over precipices, and sometimes over stretches of territory where some tornado had prostrated the huge pines in tangled confusion, through which a pathway was almost impossible. [76] To lighten their burdens, nearly every thing was abandoned but their canoes. Fish and wild-fowl were an uncertain ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain

... express that particular shade of feeling. The next movement is one of the most astounding ever conceived. Beginning like an airy scherzo, presently a march rhythm is introduced, and before one has realised the state of affairs we are in the midst of a positive tornado of passion. The first tunes then resume; but again they are dismissed, and it becomes apparent that the march theme is the real theme of the whole movement—that all the others are intended simply to lead up to it, or to form a frame in which it is set. It ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... he experienced a certain amount of anxiety concerning the coming of that summer storm. It would be only natural that he should; for if the aeroplanes were ever caught in the sweep of the furious tornado they would be as straws, to be toppled over and over to the ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy

... throat. Not a gem can repose safe from seizure, in the rocks, in the sand, or in the torrent. Not a star can twinkle in the abyss of night, but science will tell its rate of light, and describe its silent and mysterious orbit. Torrid heat, the earthquake, the tornado, the pestilence, mountains of ice, craters of flame—science will dare them all, to know one more law of nature. God speed the daring of science, if only her votaries will not place the law in the place of Him who made both it and the works which it ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... material forms, As mists to the copious shower As dead calms are to tornado storms That in tropical region lower So are educational fallacies That ignore and decry as naught The value and power that ever lie In ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite

... circumrotation[obs3], circumvolution, circumgyration[obs3]; volutation[obs3], circination|, turbination[obs3], pirouette, convolution. verticity|, whir, whirl, eddy, vortex, whirlpool, gurge[obs3]; countercurrent; Maelstrom, Charybdis; Ixion. [rotating air] cyclone; tornado, whirlwind; dust devil. [rotation of an automobile] spin-out. axis, axis of rotation, swivel, pivot, pivot point; axle, spindle, pin, hinge, pole, arbor, bobbin, mandrel; axle shaft; gymbal; hub, hub of rotation. [rotation and translation ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... dedication to the immortals bound in leather that would live on the library shelf and the ones hound in serge and corduroy that would sit at the tables in reading-room, brought the storm of applause that sounded like a tornado. ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess

... however, for the time being, was very enjoyable, in spite of numerous bruises and scratches. Huge pines raised their heads to heaven, others lay prostrate and rotting away, probably thrown down in some tornado. In the distance numbers of trees were lying on the ground, and men were cutting off their branches and burning them in heaps, which slowly smouldered away, and sent up clouds of curling blue smoke, which diffused itself as a thin blue veil over ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... will attach to that section where the active mind wakes up to the conflict between science and faith. It was a difficult age for poets and believers. The preceding generation had for a time been swept far from their bearings by the tornado of the French Revolution. Some of them found an early grave while still upholding the flag; others had won back to harbour when their youth was past and ended their days in calm—if not stagnant—waters. But the advance of scientific discoveries and the scientific ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... such a stretch of country as 325 miles could actually have been traversed between this and the last water. The weather during our halt had been very warm, the thermometer had tried to go over 100 degrees in the shade, but fell short by one degree. Yesterday was an abominable day; a heated tornado blew from the west from morning until night and continued until this morning, when, without apparent change otherwise, and no clouds, the temperature of the wind entirely altered and we had an exceedingly cool and delightful day. We found the position of this spring to be in latitude ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... When the tornado had passed, Eloise rose, smoothed her dress, opened the window that the morning air might cool her burning eyes, then at length went to find a servant who would take her trunk to the Murrays', and passed down ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... where the conditions of popular education are about those that Mr. Ruskin seems to regret as swept away by the present movement in England—a stagnant state of things, in which any wind of heaven would be a blessing, even if it were a tornado. Education of the modern sort unsettles the peasant, renders him unfit for labor, and gives us a half-educated idler in place of a conscientious workman. The disuse of the apprentice system is not made good by the present system ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... adherents in a small sloop. Vane, not discouraged by this reverse of fortune, rose again from the bottom rung of the ladder to success, and quickly increased in strength of ships and crew, until one day, being overcome by a sudden tornado, he lost everything but his life, being washed up on a small uninhabited island off the Honduras coast. Here he managed to support life by begging food from the fishermen who occasionally ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse

... noticed some fine-looking houses just on the other side, she decided that she would let the horse have his own way, and apply at one of these for shelter. She was sure that no one would deny her that in the face of such a tornado as was raging behind her. The horse flew along as if a winged thing. The spirit of the storm seemed to have entered into him, or else the thunder's voice awakened memories of the field of battle, and for once his rider found herself powerless to restrain his speed or direct ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... she ever finds out about that pigs' foot ease, she will make you think your trousers are warmer than your hair. You strike me as being a boy that resembles a tornado. No one knows when you are going to become dangerous, or where you are going to strike. You and a tornado are a good deal like a cross-eyed man; you don't strike where you look as though you were aiming, and suddenly you strike where ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck

... seal to the whole decorative art of England of to-day. It is a step 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

... Dewey's fleet has had low steam in the boilers all the while to quickly apply the power of the engines for safety in case of a visitation from the dreaded typhoon, which comes on suddenly as a squall and rages with tornado intensity. ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... story of how the stricken giant, raving in outer darkness, this Polyphemus who had gouged out his own eye, this Hercules self-invested in the poisoned robe of Nessus, moved heaven and earth to see her again. It was an earthquake, a tornado, a nightmare. He had frenzies of tears, his nights were sleepless reviews of his folly in throwing her away, and vain phantasms of her eyes and lips. He poured out torrents of telegrams and letters, in which cries of torture mingled with minute legal instructions. The correspondence of the Working-Men's ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... doubling their own in number, and comparatively fresh, was yet to be encountered. With stern displeasure Maccabeus saw his own men, grim with blood and dust, loading themselves with the rich plunder which lay on the road; like fruit under orchard trees after a wild tornado. ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker

... border. Fort after fort, city after city, had capitulated—Ticonderoga, Crown Point, Fort St. John, Fort Chambly, Montreal, Sorel, Three Rivers. Montgomery with his victorious bands had borne everything before him like a tornado. The Canadian peasantry dreaded the very sight of warriors who must be ball-proof, as they were supposed, by a curious mistake, to be "incased in plate- iron," vetus de tole, instead de toile. [54] The red [54a] and black flag of successful rebellion floated ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... replied Mildmay, "crowd sail we must; for, unless I am greatly mistaken, we are about to have a regular tornado." ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... that awful nothing, whose outside ring vibrated with fearful flames; the fiery cherubim, winged, taking all possible shapes, and unformed living shapes. A human flamed and changed and vanished. The tornado of whirling, flashing, chaotic life swirled and drove through the darkness of chaos of nothing from nothing—and that great, unknown abyss is God! But ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... the Moslem chief urged on their rowers to the top of their speed. Their galleys soon shot ahead of the rest of the line, driven through the boiling surges as by the force of a tornado, and closing with a shock that made every timber crack, and the two vessels quiver to their very keels. So powerful, indeed, was the impetus they received, that the pasha's galley, which was considerably the larger and loftier of the two, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... 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

... which was then merely a fort and huddle of houses. He made the most careful preparations for the expedition, and early in the spring, he commenced his march northward into the Indian country. The savages gathered to repulse him at a spot on the Maumee where, years before, a tornado had cut a wide swath through the forest, rendering it all but impenetrable. Here, on the twentieth of August, 1794, he advanced against the enemy, and, throwing his troops into the "Fallen Timbers," in which the Indians were ambushed, routed them out, cut them down, and administered ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson

... must be made for a cyclone, a very rare occurrence in these latitudes. Whether it be called a hurricane, as in the Atlantic, a typhoon, as in Chinese waters a simoom, as in the Sahara, or a tornado, as on the western coast, such a storm is always a gyratory one, and most dangerous for any ship caught in the current which increases from the circumference to the center, and has only one spot of calm, the middle ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne

... re-establishment of social harmony and Christian love throughout that entire community. The storms of strife had commenced with the settlement of the first minister, more than forty years before: they had increased in violence, until, at the witchcraft delusion, they swept in a tornado every thing to ruin. The clouds had been slowly dispersed, and the angry waves smoothed down, by Mr. Green's benignant ministry. The long, and yet unbroken, "era of good feeling" was fully inaugurated. It was a day of great rejoicing. Old men and matrons, young men and maidens, met together ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... to peer into the glass over the mantel, and the storm in her face quickened the storm in her heart. Raging jealousy entered and possessed her. It whirled about like a tornado, scattering before it all that was orderly, that was lesser and weaker than itself. Marie Kerr was taken up in the grip of it, and driven along upon a headlong course which she could not pause ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton

... excellent order, showed no signs of the tornado which had passed through it, and Jackson Pepper, looking vaguely round, was dimly reminded of those tropical hurricanes he had read about which would strike only the objects in the path, and ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs

... twenty fathoms there is a coral reef, and on the easterly side of this reef the water deepens, as by the side of a perpendicular wall, to a very great depth. This reef marks the boundary of the Gulf stream, and also the boundary of the terrible tornado. The tornado of the Gulf of Mexico never passes this barrier, never strikes the land, nor has it been known within memory of man upon ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... charity as just orderly charity, and I have found good reasons since to confirm me in the choice. If any doubt had lingered in my mind, my experience in helping distribute the relief fund to the tornado sufferers at Woodhaven a dozen years ago would have dispelled it. It does seem as if the chance of getting something for nothing is, on the whole, the greatest temptation one can hold out to frail human nature, whether in the slum, ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis

... the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. On the 31st day of October last, while sailing under the flag of the United States on the high seas, she was forcibly seized by the Spanish gunboat Tornado, and was carried into the port of Santiago de Cuba, where fifty-three of her passengers and crew were inhumanly, and, so far at least as relates to those who were citizens of the United States, without due process of law, put ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... takes to a 'grande passion,' It is a very serious thing indeed: Nine times in ten 't is but caprice or fashion, Coquetry, or a wish to take the lead, The pride of a mere child with a new sash on, Or wish to make a rival's bosom bleed: But the tenth instance will be a tornado, For there 's no saying what they ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... forces of the Weather than the ancients did, yet we 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 upon ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler

... 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 ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard

... that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste. Nature has provided against the absolute destruction of any of her elementary matter, the raw material of her works; the thunderbolt and the tornado, the most convulsive throes of even the volcano and the earthquake, being only phenomena of decomposition and recomposition. But she has left it within the power of man irreparably to derange the combinations of inorganic ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... his coat tails. 'But,' continued th' Speaker, reachin' behind him with an agnized ex'pression, 'I will let it go annyhow.' 'Mr. Speaker, I protest,' began th' Hon'rable Attila Sthrong, 'I protest—' At this a perfeck tornado iv rage broke out in th' gall'ries. Inkwells, bricks, combs, shoes, smellin' bottles, hand mirrors, fans, an' powdher puffs were hurled at th' onforchnit mimber. In the midst iv th' confusion th' wife iv Congressman Sthrong cud be seen wavin' a par'sol over her ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne

... east shines red. Can it be that the morn shall fulfil My dream, and refashion our clay As the poet may fashion his rhyme? Hark to that mingled scream Rising from workshop and mill— Hailing some marvelous sight; Mighty breath of the hours, Poured through the trumpets of steam; Awful tornado of time, Blowing us ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop

... Guarded the four corners of the world that nothing of her should escape, On South and North, on East and West He laid the net, his father Anu's gift. He fashioned the evil wind, the south blast, the tornado, The four-and-seven wind, the wind of destruction and woe, Sent forth the seven winds which he had made Tiamat's body to destroy, after him they followed. Then seized the lord the thunderbolt, his mighty weapon, The irresistible chariot, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... house that stood near the river, and while talking with the people within doors, I was suddenly struck with astonishment at a loud rushing roar, succeeded by instant darkness, which for the first moment I took for a tornado about to overwhelm the house, and every thing around, in destruction. The people observing my surprise, coolly said, 'It is only the pigeons,' and on running out, I beheld a flock thirty or forty yards in width, sweeping ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley

... went the Mermaid. The wind was now blowing with the force of a tornado, and, as the craft had to slant in order to descend, it felt the power of the gale more than if it had scudded before it. But, by skilful use of the directing tube, the professor was able to keep the boat from ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood

... 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

... Shriek'd Ambition's giant throng, And with them hissed the locust-fiends that crawled And glittered in Corruption's slimy track. Great was their wrath, for short they knew their reign; 440 And such commotion made they, and uproar, As when the mad Tornado bellows through The guilty islands of the western main, What time departing from their native shores,[146:2] Eboe, or Koromantyn's plain of palms, 445 The infuriate spirits of the murdered make Fierce merriment, and vengeance ask of Heaven. Warmed with new influence, the unwholesome ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... Lift her above the power of the hurricane altogether if you have still time to do so," shouted the professor in Sir Reginald's ear, as the roar of the approaching tornado thundered in their ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... room like a tornado. "I think you must certainly have gone mad, Marquis," he exclaimed. "That is the only valid excuse you ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau

... fist at door) May all the powers of heaven destroy you, Ergasilus, and that belly of yours and all parasites and anyone that gives a parasite a meal hereafter! Disaster, devastation, a tornado, has just fallen on our house. I was afraid he'd jump at my throat like ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius

... choked with dense clouds, which swirled and tumbled, and twisted themselves into great vortical rolls, spinning like gigantic millshafts. Once, one of these vortexes shot downward, with projectile speed, rapidly assuming the terrible form of the trombe of a tornado, and where it struck the ground it tore everything to pieces—trees, houses, the very earth itself were ground to powder and then whirled aloft by ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... that on the 12th of June, in consequence of a very sudden tornado, they were forced to carry their bundles into the huts of the natives, being the first time that the caravan had entered a town since leaving the Gambia. Considering the climate and season, this slight circumstance is alone a sufficient proof of the hardships which must have ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park

... firm clasp of his hand, the calm, confident glance of his gray eyes, and bowed low, as I left the room. I could scarcely realize that this quiet, reserved man could be the raging tornado who that same morning had ridden up to Lee, blazing with indignation. His very presence, his evident trust in me, sent me forth upon my long ride renewed in strength of body and purpose, the fatigue of the day forgotten. Ten ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish

... a hazel nut, and silky chestnut ringlets,—I shall gather her into my heart and coo over her as—Columba, or Umilta, or Umbeline, or Una; but should we find her spoiled, and thoroughly leavened with iniquity,—a blonde, yellow-haired tornado,—then a proper regard for the 'unities will suggest that I vigorously enter a Christian protest, and lecture her grimly as Jezebel, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... not merely in proportion to numbers. It grows in a much higher ratio. The effect is something like that of multiplying the surfaces in a galvanic battery, or increasing the coils in an electro-magnetic apparatus. Passion in a multitude becomes a tornado. Eloquence moves a large audience with a power vastly greater than when the listeners are few. Similar is that strange influence which fashion exerts in all societies. Nor is this sympathetic multiplication of ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... uninterrupted throughout Mr. Crittenden's business life. There were dark storms which threatened disastrous wreck, and nothing but stead-fastness of purpose and force of character brought him through. In 1836 the financial tornado swept over the land and stripped nearly every business man bare. When the storm was at its height Mr. Crittenden found himself with fifty thousand dollars of New York debts past due, and without the money to pay them. Collections were cut off, and whilst he was ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... was uneventful, but this is talking as one who has been across the wide ocean many times and oft. No long voyage can be uneventful; but nothing very dreadful happened to mar our passage to Rio de Janeiro. We were not caught in a tornado; we were not chased by a pirate; we saw no suspicious sail; no ghostly voice hailed us from aloft at the midnight hour; no shadowy form beckoned us from a fog. We did not even spring a leak, nor did the mainyard come tumbling ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables

... 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 loose upon us with a roar as if heaven ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... and I went on arter her like a tornado, now I tell you. But jist as I was reaching out both hands to drag her back from a wave that came roaring along, it broke, and the undertow sucked her in right ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens

... new friend had been talking too. Homer had told him of the storm at sea they met a few days before; and David, I think, had spoken of a mountain-tornado, as he met it years before. In the excitement of his narrative he struck the harp, which was still in ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale

... exception of the storm which had proven so fatal to her mother, the season had been quite free from gales, or "breezes" as the fishermen call them; for with these hardy people a good-sized tornado is only ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry

... (November, 1874), we get the picture from the other side. First, the sad disappointment of Mrs. Livingstone on the 8th January, when no "Pioneer" was to be found, with the anxious speculations raised in its absence as to the cause. Then a frightful tornado on the way to Mozambique, and the all but miraculous escape of the brig. Then the return to the Zambesi in company with H.M.S. "Gorgon," and on the 1st of February, in a lovely morning, the little cloud of smoke rising close to land, and afterward the white hull of a small paddle steamer making ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... if it could be a miniature tornado, or a cyclone or whirlwind?" and Tom spoke aloud, a habit of his when he was thinking, and had no one to talk to. "Yet it can hardly be that." he went on. "Guess I'll watch and ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton

... 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 unavoidable, and would change the face of the world, saved us from that storm. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... Meade, her eyes sparkling. "We had Indians here the early part of this summer. There was a medicine show here, with Indians and cowboys, and that sort of thing. One day the Indians and cowboys got intoxicated and they went through Main Street like a tornado. They were yelling and shooting, and had people all along the street running for cover. Even the chief of police, though he wasn't a coward, ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock

... sound louder than the roar of any European tempest, swifter to travel than the wings of any Eastern wind. Blackness engulfed the world: blackness, stabbed across from every side by intricate and blinding lightning. Almost in the same second, at one world-swallowing stride, the heart of the tornado reached the clearing. I heard an agonising crash, and the light of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... 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

... admiring, called out, "Ho, Billy! Whoa, Billy!" and headed him off from the gap, Billy profited by the circumstance to turn into the pear orchard. The elastic turf under his unguided hoof seemed to exhilarate him; his pace became a trot, a canter, a gallop, a tornado; the reins fluttered like ribbons in the air; the phaeton flew ruining after. In a terrible cyclone the equipage swept round the neighbor's house, vanished, reappeared, swooped down his lawn, and vanished ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells

... weather frightens her (and it is a real December tempest), or if that Mrs. Pryor objects to her going out, and I should miss her after all, it will vex me; but, tempest or tornado, hail or ice, she ought to come, and if she has a mind worthy of her eyes and features she will come. She will be here for the chance of seeing me, as I am here for the chance of seeing her. She will want ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... 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

... sustained. They evince not only the first order of inventive power, but a profoundly philosophical study of the influences of situation upon human character. He treads the deck with the conscious pride of home and dominion: the aspects of the sea and sky, the terrors of the tornado, the excitement of the chase, the tumult of battle, fire, and wreck, are presented by him with a freedom and breadth of outline, a glow and strength of coloring and contrast, and a distinctness and truth of general and particular conception, that place him far in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... iron supports fastened to the inner sides of the doors; and when the doors were closed, with this great plank in place, a person inside the building might seem entitled to count upon the enjoyment of privacy, except in case of earthquake, tornado, or fire. In fact, the size of the plank and the substantial quality of the iron fastenings could be looked upon, from a certain viewpoint, as a real compliment to the energy and persistence of ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... chiefs, Iberi of the Akasava, Tilini of the Lesser Isisi, Efele (the Tornado) of the N'gombi, Lisu (the Seer) of the Inner Territories, but Lilongo[12] (as they called Bosambo of the Ochori), ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... hail 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 downpour ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears

... more battles to fight now. She had her own; there was an enemy within her own camp. Even as she stood there watching him her nails gripped the stone coping fiercely because half of her was wanting last night's tornado ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... baize door she burst into the cafe like a young tornado. Every head turned her way with gaping mouths and protruding eyes of astonishment as she stopped at the caisse and brazenly, in the face of ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... walls dimmed; in front of me they melted, diaphanously, like a gelatinous wall in a blast of flame; through their vanishing, under the torrent of driving light, the unthinkable, impalpable tornado, I began to move, slowly—then ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... quickly 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

... fixed in the basket along with that cat—some sort of a patent machine; cost thousands of dollars—and he was expecting to examine it; and Green had an idea he'd lift out a dead cat and take in the stakes. When all of a sudden, as she came pelting down, a tornado struck her—now, Maria, what in the thunder are you staring at me in that way for? It was a tornado—a regular cyclone—and it struck her and jammed her against the lightning-rod on the Baptist church-steeple; and there she stuck—stuck on that ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)

... is a 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 voice, with a ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... 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, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... of the force once more formed into a square to meet the enemy's attack. It was like a tornado when it came. ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm

... which should be brought out when it is correctly interpreted—which usually it is not. The greatest of all the etudes is the "Revolutionary," Op. 10, No. 12. It was written by Chopin in 1831, when he heard the news that Warsaw had been taken by the Russians, and it expresses the tornado of emotion that swept over him when he realized that Poland was about to sink beneath the triple onslaught of Russia, Austria and Germany. This composition which, mind you, goes by the simple name of "study," is one of the most tremendous outbursts of wrath in music—a storm of ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb

... uttered at the meetings at which every town and village gave expression to the horror inspired by the Sultan's crimes. Mr. Gladstone's strongest utterances were seized upon by his fervent admirers and were carried to an extreme from which he himself would have shrunk. It was a whirlwind, a tornado of political passion that swept over the country during those sunny September weeks. The impulse from which it sprang was just and noble in itself; but who can hold a whirlwind in check? It is not wonderful that this great ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.

... the presence of a great question like this. Politics should not be thought of in view of the question of disunion. By what measure of execration will posterity judge a man who contributed toward the dissolution of the Union? Shall we stand here and higgle about terms when the roar of the tornado is heard that threatens to sweep our Government from the face of the earth? Believe me, sir, this is a question of ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden

... gallant doings, and to exalt Sir Francis Drake's skill and bravery, and at last to let it ooze out, under Cis's eager questioning, that when his captain had died of fever on the Hispaniola coast, and they had been overtaken by a tornado, Sir Francis had declared that it was Humfrey's skill and steadfastness which had saved the ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the wind let up, and we started in the late evening for the run to Old Crow, which we are anxious to see. Head winds. Hard paddling. Kept on into the night, but met an awful storm. Wind was almost a tornado, and for a wonder snow fell in sheets. Our canoe got turned around two or three times in the night, and we wouldn't know which way to go, for the wind came up-stream and every other way. We nearly ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough









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