A blizzard was blowing wildly over the American prairies one winter day in the earlier part of the present century. Fresh, free and straight, it came from the realms of Jack Frost, and cold-bitterly cold-like the bergs on the Arctic seas, to which it had but recently said farewell. Snow, fine as dust and sharp as needles, was caught up bodily by the wind in great masses-here in snaky coils, there in whirling eddies, elsewhere in rolling clouds; but these had barely time to assume indefinite forms when they were furiously scattered and swept away as by the besom of destruction, while earth and sky commingled in a smother of whitey-grey.