TRANSCRIPT

While the size of the hail was as small as marbles and as big as walnuts, yet we picked up a few that measured three inches across or nine inches around, made up of five or six smaller stones frozen together in fierce whirling they had undergone in the cloud before striking the ground.

Alas! the poor little chicks in the coop were all either drowned or chilled to death. In the garden, upon which we depended for our winter vegetables, not a potato to be seen, of the cabbages, only a few torn pieces of leaves driven into the ground, and what of the flourishing grain field that but an hour since had proudly lifted its leaves to the sun? Only a black field of earth was left, with nothing on it except a surface indented all over with holes like huge smallpox marks, where the lashing hail had been driven deep into the soil after having cut to pieces the grain so that not a vestige was visible.

And what of the luxuriant prairie grass, with its beautiful colors of wild flowers that spread like a thick carpet over the ground but an hour ago? Nothing left but the top of the prairie sod, not a pound of hay could we cut there now for winter use for our cattle, and walking next day along the edge of 'Sleepy Creek,' we counted dozens of little dead ducklings floating on the bays of the creek. And the horses came up to the farm with lumps on their back as big as walnuts, where the hail had struck them, and woe betide any settler coming from town, if he were caught with his team in that terrible storm of 1899.

A dramatized reading of H. B. Adshead's story published in Pioneer Tales and Other Human Stories. 1922