"The house was little," the doctor commenced, "or it might not have happened. There was only one room. It was built of boards and weighed next to nothing, which may have helped to account for it. "On that particular day the house was situated in the northern part of the State." He swapped legs. "But the next day," he resumed. "Well, you can't tell exactly where any house will be the next day in Kansas. "It was about noon and Cyclona's foster father was out in the cornfield, plowing. The wind, as usual, was blowing a gale. It was a mild gale, sixty miles an hour, so Jonathan did not permit it to interfere with his plowing. The rows were a little uneven because the wind blew the horse sidewise and that naturally dragged the plow out of the furrows, but as one rarely sees a straight row of corn in Kansas, Jonathan was not worried. If he took pains to sow the corn straight, in trim and systematic rows, like as not the wind would blow the seed out of the ground into his neighbor's cornfield, so what was the use? "Like the horse and plough, Jonathan was walking crooked, bent in the direction of the wind. He seldom walks straight or talks straight for that matter, the wind has had such an effect on him. "At any rate, leaving out the question of his reasoning which pursues a devious and zigzag course, varying according to the way the wind blows--and he is not alone in this peculiarity in Kansas, as I say--Jonathan steadily toiled against the wind, he stopped altogether, and taking out his lunch basket, he removed a pie and sat down on a log to eat it, while his horse, moving a little further along, propped himself against a cottonwood tree to keep from being entirely blown away, and also rested." He swapped tobacco wads from one cheek to the other and continued: "The pie was made of custard, Jonathan said, with meringue on the top. The meringue blew away, but Jonathan contentedly ate the custard, thankful that the hungry wind had not taken that. "Mrs. Jonathan had been going about all morning with a dust rag in her hand, wiping the dust from the sills and the furniture. "So, tired out at last, she had flung herself on the bed and was quietly napping when the cyclone came along. "Of course, the house and the bed she was lying on were shaken, but Mrs. Jonathan had lived so long in Kansas she couldn't sleep unless the wind rocked the bed. "She slept all the sounder, therefore, lulled by its whistling and moaning and sobbing, not waking even when Cyclona, this girl they had adopted, opened the door and shut it suddenly with herself on the inside, and a fortunate thing, too, that was for Cyclona, or the cyclone might have left her behind. "Cyclona, standing by the window, saw it all, the swiftly passing landscape, the trees, the cows, as one would look from an observation car on a train.