Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/220

210 an account of a ball which he observed during a very violent storm on December 20, 1888, at half past six in the evening, while he was driving from Versoix to Genthod. As he passed the entrance gate of a large mansion he became aware of a very bright and persistent illumination, quite different from the intermittent light of the incessant lightning Hashes.

Thinking it was a fire, he turned and saw, about one thousand feet away, a ball of fire some eighteen inches in diameter. It floated about half its diameter above the ground, and moved parallel with his own course with the swiftness of a hawk, leaving no trace behind it.

At a point about twenty-five yards ahead of him it burst with an appalling crash. "It seemed to me," the report concludes, "to throw out lines of fire. We felt a violent shock, and were blinded for several seconds. As soon as I could distinguish anything, I saw that the horses were standing at right angles to the carriage, with their heads toward the hedge. Their ears drooped, and they exhibited every symptom of intense fright." At the same time, a little less than a mile away, a farmer found himself surrounded by a violet light. He heard a loud explosion, and was thrown bodily ten feet, alighting on a piece of soft turf, more frightened than hurt.

On July 1, 1891, a fireball entered a carpenter's cabin near Schlieben. The carpenter was sitting on the edge of a bed on which a child was sleeping. A ball of fire sprang suddenly and with a loud noise from the fireplace to the bed, which was immediately shattered. Then the ball rolled very slowly to the opposite wall of the room, through which, or the floor, it apparently vanished with another fearful crash without setting fire to anything. The man's wife and another child were sleeping in a second bed and the baby in a cradle, all in the same room, but none of the five persons was wounded or even stunned. All complained of headache and deafness on account of the heavy sulphurous vapor which filled the room, but they soon recovered. Some fractures were discovered about the stove and chimney.

Less fortunate were the children in a schoolhouse in Bouin, France, who were visited by a fireball while at their afternoon prayers. It was preceded by a shower of lime, wood, and stones. The ball, which was small, rolled along under the benches, killing three of the children, and went out through a window pane, in which it merely made a round hole, whereas all the other panes were shattered.

On January 2, 1890, a ball appeared in an electro-technical establishment in Pontevedra, Spain. It was seen to strike the line wires about nine o'clock in the evening under a clear sky, but no one could say just how it struck or from what direction it came.