2$2 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



whatever his sensitivenesses may have been that the columns of 

 the Times were "hardly suitable" for such a discussion. If, in the 

 past, there had been more persons like General Lefroy, we'd have 

 better than the mere fragments of data that in most cases are too 

 broken up very well to piece together. He took the trouble to 

 write to a friend of his, W. H. Gosling, of Bermuda who also was 

 an extraordinary person. He went to the trouble of interviewing 

 Mrs. Bassett and Mrs. Lowell. Their description to him was some- 

 what different: 



An object from which nets were suspended 



Deflated balloon, with its network hanging from it =r? 



A super-dragnet? 



That something was trawling overhead? 



The birds of Baton Rouge. 



Mr. Gosling wrote that the item of chains, or suggestion of a 

 basket that had been attached, had originated with Mr. Bassett, 

 who had not seen the object. Mr. Gosling mentioned a balloon that 

 had escaped from Paris in July. He tells of a balloon that fell in 

 Chicago, Sept. 17, or three weeks later than the Bermuda object. 



It's one incredibility against another, with disregards and convic- 

 tions governed by whichever of the two Dominants looms stronger 

 in each reader's mind. That he can't think for himself any more 

 than I can is understood. 



My own correlates: 



I think that we're fished for. It may be that we're highly 

 esteemed by super-epicures somewhere. It makes me more cheerful 

 when I think that we may be of some use after all. I think that 

 dragnets have often come down and have been mistaken for whirl- 

 winds and waterspouts. Some accounts of seeming structure in 

 whirlwinds and waterspouts are astonishing. And I have data that, 

 in this book, I can't take up at all mysterious disappearances. I 

 think we're fished for. But this is a little expression on the side: 

 relates to trespassers; has nothing to do with the subject that I 

 shall take up at some other time or our use to some other mode 

 of seeming that has a legal right to us. 



Nature, 33-137: 



"Our Paris correspondent writes that in relation to the balloon 

 which is said to have been seen over Bermuda, in September, no 

 ascent took place in France which can account for it." 



Last of August: not September. In the London Times there is no 

 mention of balloon ascents in Great Britain, in the summer of 1885, 



