BOOK OF THE DAMNED 107 



Mr. Symons learned that in the same street he emphasizes that 

 it was a short street there was a fire-engine station. I had such 

 an impression of him hustling and bustling around at Notting Hill, 

 searching cellars until he found one with newly arrived coal in it; 

 ringing door bells, exciting a whole neighborhood, calling up to 

 second-story windows, stopping people in the streets, hotter and hot- 

 ter on the trail of a wretched impostor of a chemist's pupil. After 

 his efficiency at Notting Hill, we'd expect to hear that he went to 

 the station, and something like this: 



"It is said that clinkers fell, in your street, at about ten minutes 

 past four o'clock, afternoon of July fifth. Will you look over your 

 records and tell me where your engine was at about ten minutes 

 past four, July fifth?" 



Mr. Symons says: 



"I think that most probably they had been raked out of the steam 

 fire-engine." 



June 20, 1880, it was reported that a "thunderstone" had struck 

 the house at 180 Oakley Street, Chelsea, falling down the chimney, 

 into the kitchen grate. 



Mr. Symons investigated. 



He describes the "thunderstone" as an "agglomeration of brick, 

 soot, unburned coal, and cinder." 



He says that, in his opinion, lightning had flashed down the 

 chimney, and had fused some of the brick of it. 



He does think it remarkable that the lightning did not then 

 scatter the contents of the grate, which were disturbed only as if 

 a heavy body had fallen. If we admit that climbing up the 

 chimney to find out, is too rigorous a requirement for a man 

 who may have been large, dignified and subject to expansions, the 

 only unreasonableness we find in what he says as judged by our 

 more modern outlook, is: 



"I suppose that no one would suggest that bricks are manufac- 

 tured in the atmosphere." 



Sounds a little unreasonable to us, because it is so of the posi- 

 tivistic spirit of former times, when it was not so obvious that the 

 highest incredibility and laughability must merge away with the 

 "proper" as the Sci. Am. Sup. would say. The preposterous is 

 always interpretable in terms of the "proper," with which it must 

 be continuous or clay-like masses such as have fallen from the 

 sky tremendous heat generated by their velocity they bake 

 bricks. 



