It
was thawing by ten o'clock. The temperature had run up as the wind
dropped; and as I now know, with the lowering of the pressure of the
barometer, if we had had one.

"This is a weather-breeder!"

This was my way of telling to myself what a scientist would have
described as marked low barometer; and he would have predicted from his
maps that we should soon find ourselves in the northwest quadrant of
the "low" with high winds and falling temperature. It all comes to the
same thing.

Instead of going to see Virginia before her school opened in the
morning, I went to work banking up my house, fixing my sheds, and
reefing things down for a gale as I learned to say on the Lakes. I made
up my mind that I would go to the schoolhouse just before four and
surprise Virginia, and hoped it would be a little stormy so I could have
an excuse to take her home. I need not have worried about the storm.
It came.

At noon the northwestern sky, a third of the way to a point overhead,
was of an indigo-blue color; but it still seemed to be clear sky--though
I looked at it with suspicion, it was such an unusual thing for January.
As I stood gazing at it, Narcisse Lacroix, Pierre's twelve-year-old boy,
came by with his little sister. I asked him if school was out, and he
said the teacher had sent them home because there was no more fuel for
the stove; but it was so warm that the teacher was going to stay and
sweep out, and write up her register.

As the children went out of sight, a strange and awful change came over
the face of nature. The bright sun was blotted out as it touched the
edge of that rising belt of indigo blue. This blanket of cloud, like a
curtain with puckering strings to bring it together in the southeast,
drew fast across the sky--very, very fast, considering that there was
not a breath of wind stirring. It was a fearful thing to see, the
blue-black cloud hurrying up the sky, over the sky, and far down until
there was no bright spot except a narrowing oval near the southeastern
horizon; and not a breath of wind. The storm was like a leaning wall,
that bent far over us while its foot dragged along the ground, miles and
miles behind its top. Everything had a tinge of strange, ghastly
greenish blue like the face of a corpse, and it was growing suddenly
dark as if the day had all at once shut down into dusk.

I knew what it meant, though I had never seen the change from calm
warmth to cold wind come with such marked s