372 Another Stone from the Clouds. 



passed round by the south, towards the east; at first as if 

 three or four cannon had been fired off, about the great 

 bridge which conducts the Forth and Clyde canal over the 

 river Kelvin, at the distance of a mile and a half westward 

 from the quarrv; and afterwards as a violent rushing, whiz- 

 zing noise. Along with these last people, there were two 

 boys, one of ten, and the other of four years old, and a 

 dog : the dog, on hearing the noise, ran home seemingly in a 

 grcctt fright. The overseer, during the continuance of the 

 noise, on looking up to the atmosphere, observed in it a 

 misty commotion, which occasioned in him a considerable 

 alarm ; when he called out to the man on the tree, " Come 

 down, I think there is some judgment coming upon us;" 

 and says, that the man on the tree had scarcely got upon 

 the ground, when something struck with great force, in a 

 drain made for turning off water, in the time of, or after 

 rain, about ninety yards distance, splashing mud and water 

 for about twenty feet round. The elder boy, led by the 

 noise to look up to the atmosphere, says, that he observed 

 the appearance of smoke in it, with something of a reddish 

 colour moving rapidly through the air, from the west, till 

 it fell on the ground. The younger boy, at the instant before 

 the stroke against the earth was heard, called out, "Oh 

 such a reek !" and says, that he then saw an appearance of 

 smoke near the place where the body fell on the ground. 

 The overseer immediately ran up to the place where the 

 splashing was observed, when he saw a hole made at the 

 bottom of the drain. In that place a small stream of water, 

 perhaps about a quarter of an inch deep, was running over 

 a gentle declivity, and no spring is near it. The hole was 

 filling with vvater, and about six inches of it remained still 

 empty. The overseer, having made bare his arm, thrust his 

 hand and arm into the hole, which he judges to have been 

 almost perpendicular, the bottom being perhaps rather a 

 very little inclined to the east, and the upper part of it to 

 the west : at the bottom of the whole he felt something 

 hard, which he could not move with his hand. The hole 

 was then cleared out, with a shovel and mattock, from an 

 expectation that a cannon ball might be found; but nothing 

 was observed except the natural stratum of soil, and a soft 

 sandy rock upon which it lay, and two pieces of stone, 

 that had penetrated a few inches through the rock. The 

 pieces of stone he took to be whinstone, and thinks that 

 they were eighteen inches below the bottom of the drain, 

 and that the hole was about fifteen inches in diameter. He 

 was not sensible of any particular heat in the water, or in 

 4 the 



