The thought in my mind was, Hurry!  Hurry!  For what if Virginia, in the schoolhouse without fuel, should try to reach the place where she boarded, or any inhabited house, in that storm?  As yet there was no snow in the air except the few flakes which were driven horizontally out of the fierce squall; but I knew that this could not last; for the crust on the blanket of snow already on the ground would soon be ground through wherever exposed to the sand-blast of particles already driven along the surface of the earth in a creeping sheet of white.  As I hurriedly finished my dressing, I heard the rattle of a shower of missiles as they struck the house; and looking out I saw that the crust was already being cut through by this grinding process; and as the wind got a purchase under the crust, it was torn up in great flakes as if blown up by a thousand explosions from underneath.  In an instant, almost, for these bursts of snow took place nearly all at once, the air was filled with such a smother of snow that the landscape went out of sight in a great cloud of deep-shaded whiteness.  The blizzard was upon us.  I should have my work cut out for me in getting to the schoolhouse.

I wonder if the people who have been born in or moved to Iowa in the past thirty to forty years can be made to understand that we can not possibly have such winter storms of this sort as we had then.  The groves themselves prevent it.  The standing corn-stalks prevent it.  Every object that civilization and development have placed in the way of the wind prevents it.  Then, the snow, once lifted on the wings of the blast, became a part of the air, and remained in it.  The atmosphere for hundreds of feet, for thousands of feet from the grassy surface of the prairie, was a moving cloud of snow, which fell only as the very tempest itself became over-burdened with it.  As the storm continued, it always grew cold; for it was the North emptying itself into the South.  I knew what the blizzard was; and my breath caught as I thought of Virginia, in what I knew must be a losing struggle with it.

Even to the strongest man, there was terror in this storm, the breath of which came with a roar and struck with a shiver, as the trees creaked and groaned, and the paths and roads were obliterated.  As the tumult grows hills are leveled, and hollows rise into hills.  Every shed-roof is the edge of an oblique Niagara of snow; every angle the center of a whirlpool.  If you are caught out in it, the Spirit of the Storm flies at you and loads your eyebrows and eyelashes and hair and beard with icicles and snow.  As you look out into the white, the light through your bloodshot eyelids turns everything to crimson.  Your feet lag, as the feathery whiteness comes almost to your knees.  Your breath comes choked as with water.  If you are out far away from shelter, God help you!  You struggle along for a time, all the while fearing to believe that the storm which did not seem so very dangerous, is growing more violent,