destructive slaughter went on until the game grew too lean to be worth the killing. All sorts of wild animals grew scarce from that winter. Old settlers say that the slow cowardly breed of prairie wolves, which used to be caught and killed as readily as sheep, disappeared about that time and none but the fleeter and stronger survived. Only once since then has nature shown such extravagant severity in Illinois, and that was on a day in the winter of 1836, known to Illinoisans as "the sudden change." At noon on the 20th of December, after a warm and rainy morning, the ground being covered with mud and slush, the temperature fell instantly forty degrees. A man riding into Springfield for a marriage license says a roaring and crackling wind came upon him and the rain-drops dripping from his bridle-reins and beard changed in a second into jingling icicles. He rode hastily into the town and arrived in a few minutes at his destination; but his clothes were frozen like sheet iron, and man and saddle had to be taken into the house together to be thawed apart. Geese and chickens were caught by the feet and wings and frozen to the wet ground. A drove of a thousand hogs, which were being driven to St. Louis, rushed together for warmth, and became piled in a great heap. Those inside smothered and those outside froze, and the ghastly pyramid remained there on the prairie for weeks: the drovers barely escaped with their lives. Men killed their horses, disemboweled them, and crept into the cavity of their bodies to escape the murderous wind. [Footnote: Although the old settlers of Sangamon County are acquainted with these facts, and we have often heard them and many others like them from the lips of eye-witnesses, we have preferred to cite only these incidents of the sudden change which are given in the careful and conscientious compilation entitled "The Early Settlers of Sangamon County," by John Carroll Power.]