240 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



unaccompanied by the red rain that makes the fall of birds in 

 France peculiar, and very peculiar, if it be accepted that the red 

 substance was extra-mundane. The other notes are upon birds that 

 have fallen from the sky, in the midst of storms, or of exhausted, 

 but living, birds, falling not far from a storm-area. But now we 

 shall have an instance for which I can find no parallel: fall of dead 

 birds, from a clear sky, far-distant from any storm to which they 

 could be attributed so remote from any discoverable storm 

 that 



My own notion is that, in the summer of 1896, something, or 

 some beings, came as near to this earth as they could, upon a hunt- 

 ing expedition; that, in the summer of 1896, an expedition of super- 

 scientists passed over this earth, and let down a dragnet and what 

 would it catch, sweeping through the air, supposing it to have 

 reached not quite to this earth? 



In the Monthly Weather Review, May, 1917, W. L. McAtee 

 quotes from the Baton Rouge correspondence to the Philadelphia 

 Times: 



That, in the summer of 1896, into the streets of Baton Rouge, 

 La., and from a "clear sky," fell hundreds of dead birds. There 

 were wild ducks and cat birds, woodpeckers, and "many birds of 

 strange plumage," some of them resembling canaries. 



Usually one does not have to look very far from any place to 

 learn of a storm. But the best that could be done in this instance 

 was to say: 



"There had been a storm on the coast of Florida." 



And, unless he have psycho-chemic repulsion for the explanation, 

 the reader feels only momentary astonishment that dead birds from 

 a storm in Florida should fall from an unstormy sky in Louisiana, 

 and with his intellect greased like the plumage of a wild duck, the 

 datum then drops oft. 



Our greasy, shiny brains. That they may be of some use after 

 all: that other modes of existence place a high value upon them as 

 lubricants; that we're hunted for them; a hunting expedition to this 

 earth the newspapers report a tornado. 



If from a clear sky, or a sky in which there were no driven clouds, 

 or other evidences of still-continuing wind-power or, if from a 

 storm in Florida, it could be accepted that hundreds of birds had 

 fallen far away, in Louisiana, I conceive, conventionally, of heavier 

 objects having fallen in Alabama, say, and of the fall of still heavier 

 objects still nearer the origin in Florida. 



