Now came the arrowy flight and form of the hurricane itself. It crushed the tall and sturdy trees to the ground as if they had been a forest of reeds. On it came, darker, fiercer, and more impetuous, as if under the influence of some angry fiend enjoying a triumph. The shrieking of the lashed winds; the crashing thunder; the noise of the giant monarchs of the forest upheaving from their deep-set foundations, and toppling to the ground; the rush and howling of the tempest--all mingled in one swelling uproar, and deafened the very heavens. Now the whole malignity and embodied power of the hurricane was upon them. The shivering horse sprang forward into the shelter of a huge rock that frowned upon the road like some stern sentinel guarding the passage, and David White leaped from the saddle, and crouched in terror against the dark mass that towered above and afforded protection. On it came, winding its tortuous pathway from right to left and from left to right, crushing and twisting the Titans of the woods from their trunks in its awful rush of destruction. The wheeling clouds and tumultuous atmosphere were lashed through and through with the fiery lightning, and masses of loose leaves, and branches, with all their wealth of mangled foliage--saplings twisted up by the roots, and bunches of shrubs tossed themselves impetuously into the air, flung into the wildest and most rapid agitation--now rushing together as if consolidating into masses--now scattered abroad in the deepest confusion, while a stubborn oak, disdaining to bend, was dashed headlong across the road, where the horse and his rider had stood only a few moments previous, and hurling the soil to their very feet. Rush after rush of the trooping winds went by--each succeeding onset wilder and more impetuous than the last, until at length the sullen distant roar--and then the low, surging murmurs announced that the greatest danger had overblown, and that the hurricane was winding its tortuous pathway through the forests many miles away to the right. Gradually the devastations of the awful skies became mellowed down; the wheeling clouds began to dispart, and a gush of heavy drops came pattering from above. Moaning pitifully, the prostrate and bowed trees and undergrowth lifted their mangled boughs from the compressed state into which they had been forced--those which had survived the tempest, seemingly with a painful effort, regaining their upright and natural position.