io6 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



fallen from the sky. As to credulity, I know of no limits for it 

 but when it comes to paying out money for credulity oh, no 

 standards to judge by, of course just the same 



The trouble with efficiency is that it will merge away into excess. 

 With what seems to me to be super-abundance of convincingness, 

 Mr. Symons then lugs another character into his little comedy: 



That it was all a hoax by a chemist's pupil, who had filled a cap- 

 sule with an explosive, and "during the storm had thrown the 

 burning mass into the gutter, so making an artificial thunder- 

 bolt." 



Or even Shakespeare, with all his inartistry, did not lug in King 

 Lear to make Hamlet complete. 



Whether I'm lugging in something that has no special meaning, 

 myself, or not, I find that this storm of June 30, 1866, was peculiar. 

 It is described in the London Times, July 2, 1866: that "during the 

 storm, the sky, in many places remained partially clear while hail 

 and rain were falling." That may have more meaning when we 

 take up the possible extra-mundane origin of some hailstones, espe- 

 cially if they fall from a cloudless sky. Mere suggestion, not worth 

 much, that there may have been falls of extra-mundane substances, 

 in London, June 30, 1866. 



Clinkers, said to have fallen, during a storm, at Kilburn, July 5, 

 1877: 



According to the Kilburn Times, July 7, 1877, quoted by Mr. 

 Symons, a street had been "literally strewn," during the storm, with 

 a mass of clinkers, estimated at about two bushels: sizes from that 

 of a walnut to that of a man's hand "pieces of the clinkers can be 

 seen at the Kilburn Times office." 



If these clinkers, or cinders, were refuse from one of the super- 

 mercantile constructions from which coke and coal and ashes occa- 

 sionally fall to this earth, or, rather, to the Super-Sargasso Sea, from 

 which dislodgment by tempests occurs, it is intermediatistic to 

 accept that they must merge away somewhere with local phenomena 

 of the scene of precipitation. If a red-hot stove should drop from 

 a cloud into Broadway, some one would find that at about the 

 time of the occurrence, a moving van had passed, and that the 

 moving men had tired of the stove, or something that it had not 

 been really red-hot, but had been rouged instead of blacked, by 

 some absent-minded housekeeper. Compared with some of the 

 scientific explanations that we have encountered, there's consider- 

 able restraint, I think, in that one. 



