The first squall of that great tempest broke from the dark south–east. It burst through the sleet, and dashed it upwards like an army of archers shooting; ere a man could stay himself one way, it had caught him up from another. The leaves from the ground flew up again through the branches which had dropped them; and then a cloud of all manner of foliage, whirling, flustering, capering, flitting, soared high over the highest tree–tops, and drove through the sky like dead shooting–stars. All that afternoon, the squalls flew faster, screaming onward to one another, furious maniacs dashing headlong, smiting themselves and everything. Then there came a lull. So sudden that the silence was more stunning than the turmoil. A pause for sunset; for brave men countless to see their last of sunlight. That evening, the sundown gun from Calshot was heard over all the forest. I remember to have expected fully that the next flaw of air would come, like a heavy sigh, from the south–west. The expectation showed how much I underrated the magnitude of that broad stormʼs area. If the wind had chopped then, it would have been only a hard gale, not a hurricane. Like a wave of the sea, it came on solidly, and from the old direction; no squall, no blast, any more; but one bodily rush of phalanxed air through a chasm in the firmament. Black, and tossing stone and metal as a girl jerks up her hat–plume, it swept the breadth of land and sea, as bisons horded sweep the snow–drifts, as Niagara sweeps the weeds away. Where the full force of that storm broke, any man must have been mad drunk who attempted to go to bed. Houses unroofed, great trees snapped off and flung into another tree, men caught like chaff from the winnowing and dropped somewhere in pond or gravel–pit, the carrierʼs van overthrown on the road, and three oaks come down to lie upon it,—some blown–away people brought news of these things, and fetched their breath up to tell them. Our own staunch hearths rocked under us, and we looked for the walls to fall in upon us, as every mad rush came plunging. Miss Eudoxia sat with Amy, near the kitchen fire; at least where the fire should have been, but the wind had quenched it long ago. Near them cowered Jemima and Jenny, begging not to be sent to bed. They had crawled up–stairs to see about it, and the floor came up to them—so they said—like the shifting plate of the oven. The parlour chimney–stack had fallen; but, in Godʼs mercy, clear and harmless from the roof of the house. No fear of the thatch taking fire: that wind would have blown out the fire of London.