A few years ago, too, Dr. Tripe was watching a very severe thunderstorm,
when he saw a fire-ball come quietly gliding up to him, apparently
rising from the earth rather than falling towards it. Instead of running
away, like a practical man, the intrepid doctor held his ground quietly
and observed the fiery monster with scientific nonchalance. After
continuing its course for some time in a peaceful and regular fashion,
however, without attempting to assault him, it finally darted off at a
tangent in another direction, and turned apparently into forked
lightning. A fire-ball, noticed among the Glendowan Mountains in
Donegal, behaved even more eccentrically, as might be expected from its
Irish antecedents. It first skirted the earth in a leisurely way for
several hundred yards like a cannon-ball; then it struck the ground,
ricochetted, and once more bounded along for another short spell; after
which it disappeared in the boggy soil, as if it were completely
finished and done for. But in another moment it rose again, nothing
daunted, with Celtic irrepressibility, several yards away, pursued its
ghostly course across a running stream (which shows, at least, there
could have been no witchcraft in it), and finally ran to earth for good
in the opposite bank, leaving a round hole in the sloping peat at the
spot where it buried itself. Where it first struck, it cut up the peat
as if with a knife, and made a broad deep trench which remained
afterwards as a witness of its eccentric conduct.
Pages:
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193