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Show 1836- X837] Flagg's Far West 363 along the pathway of the week that is gone. Last evening at this hour I was entering the town of Pinkneyville, and my last number left me soberly regaling myself upon the harmonious vocalities of the sombre little village of Salem. Here, then, may I well enough resume " the thread of my discourse." During my wanderings in Illinois I have more than once referred to the frequency and violence of the thunder- gusts by which it is visited. I had travelled not many miles the morning after leaving Salem when I was assailed by one of the most terrific storms I remember to have yet encoimtered. All the morning the atmosphere had been most oppressive, [ 118] the sultriness completely prostrating, and the livid exhalations quivered along the parched- up soil of the prairies, as if over the mouth of an enormous furnace. A gauzy mist of silvery whiteness at length diffused itself over the landscape; an inky cloud came heaving up in the northern horizon, and soon the thunder- peal began to bellow and reverberate along the darkened prairie, and the great raindrops came tumbling to the ground. Fortunately, a shelter was at hand; but hardly had the traveller availed himself of its liberal hospitality, when the heavens were again lighted up by the sunbeams; the sable cloud rolled off to the east, and all was beautiful and calm, as if the angel of desolation in his hurried flight had but for a moment stooped die shade of his dusky wing, and had then swept onward to accomplish elsewhere his terrible bidding. With a reflection like this I was about remounting to pursue my way, when a prolonged, deafening, terrible crash - as if the wild idea of heathen mythology was indeed about to be realized, and the thunder- car of Olympian Jove was dashing through the concave above - caused me to falter with foot in stirrup, and almost involuntarily to turn my eye in the direction from which the bolt |