A West Indian hurricane could not have been quicker on its feet than our little cyclone, and when the house rose a-tiptoe, like a cockerel in act to crow, and a sixty-foot elm went by the board, and that which had been a dusty road became a roaring torrent all in three minutes, we felt that the New England summer had creole blood in her veins.

In the street before him a pair of half-grown cockerels with ludicrously long legs and abbreviated tails were scratching a precarious living from amid the litter.