The chief drawback to the fine Texas climate is the “Norther” or cold north wind, that is really sometimes pretty bad. You can hear the wind roar for minutes before it reaches you, and when it strikes the temperature goes down and down. I heard a norther coming once about four o’clock in the afternoon, and ran out to the porch to look at the thermometer. It stood at 106° F., and within fifteen minutes it was 70° F. and still dropping, and by morning it was freezing. These northers seldom last over three days at a time, and they are generally followed by beautiful weather. There are about a dozen or so of them in a winter, but unless accompanied by rain they are not so bad as one might think. I was fishing on the Nueces river one Saturday night about ten o’clock for cat-fish, when I was surprised by a wet norther. I crawled with my saddle, &c., under a shelving rock and waited for the rain and hail to let up a bit. After a while I noticed that the river was rising, and as I happened to be on the wrong side from home, and the river sometimes stays up for three or four days, I had perforce to saddle up and get across while I could. When I got to the other side I could find no shelter, and as I had a good mess of fish I thought I might as well strike out for home. I did not feel the full force of the wind till I got out of the bottoms, but it was bitter when I reached the hills. I was so nearly frozen when I got home, about 2 A.M., that I could not unsaddle my horse till I had gone into the house, got a hot whisky, and warmed up. On another occasion I was deer-hunting with a friend. We drove out in the evening in my buggy and pitched camp on a little rise where there was dry firewood, and after cooking supper we rolled up in our blankets and went to sleep. In the night a dry norther came up, and it was one of the worst I ever saw. Each pretended to be asleep so that the other should light a fire, but at last we could stand it no longer, so we both got up and built a fire. The only way we could keep from freezing was to pull the buggy up to the windward side of the fire and make a wind-brake of some of our blankets tied to the wheels, so that we could sit between this and the fire. But the windbreak also acted as a chimney and sucked the smoke into our faces. When day broke we had to give up the idea of hunting. Our faces were the colour of a well-smoked ham, and our eyes so bloodshot that we could not see a deer at fifty yards. But curiously enough, one never seems to be the worse for being caught in one of these storms, and one seldom takes cold.