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hurrying along the gleaming pavement with their 

 umbrellas up, while the lightning enveloped them and 

 all around them in a sheet of livid flame. As their 

 deaths were not reported in the newspapers I can only 

 assume that the fate which they courted did not over- 

 take them, any more than it did a gay group of young 

 girls who, I observed, had taken shelter under a tree 

 a little distance away. At the storm's height when, 

 as near as I could tell, it was over Westminster 

 several cyclists rode past me with the lightning playing 

 in malevolent gleams about them and their machines. 

 The spectacle roused the greatest fears within me that 

 the next flash would reveal so many inanimate bodies 

 lying in the road amidst a tangle of fused and twisted 

 metal. I have been indeed often tempted to ask 

 myself if cyclists and motorists bear charmed lives out 

 in a thunderstorm, so rarely do they seem to come to 

 harm. Perhaps there is an element of luck in their 

 immunity, just as there is in one's escape from measles, 

 or lock-jaw, or blood-poisoning. 



The last information I had of this severe storm was 

 that it passed on to Woolwich. It was thus making 

 for the mouth of the Thames. That was early on the 

 following (Saturday) morning. Now, by noon of that 

 day it had probably reached the entrance to the 

 Straits of Dover. The unfortunate Hamel , but I 

 have no evidence before me of a thunderstorm in any 

 part of the Straits or the Channel when that brilliant 

 young airman was making what proved to be his fatal 

 traverse. 



I am reminded that Darwin suspected thunder- 

 storms to be very common near the mouths of great 

 rivers. In his Researches he points out how peculiarly 



