nster with scientific nonchalance. After
continuing its course for some time in a peaceful and regular fashion,
however, without attempting to assault him, it finally darted off at a
tangent in another direction, and turned apparently into forked
lightning. A fire-ball, noticed among the Glendowan Mountains in
Donegal, behaved even more eccentrically, as might be expected from its
Irish antecedents. It first skirted the earth in a leisurely way for
several hundred yards like a cannon-ball; then it struck the ground,
ricochetted, and once more bounded along for another short spell; after
which it disappeared in the boggy soil, as if it were completely
finished and done for. But in another moment it rose again, nothing
daunted, with Celtic irrepressibility, several yards away, pursued its
ghostly course across a running stream (which shows, at least, there
could have been no witchcraft in it), and finally ran to earth for good
in the opposite bank, leaving a round hole in the sloping peat at the
spot where it buried itself. Where it first struck, it cut up the peat
as if with a knife, and made a broad deep trench which remained
afterwards as a witness of its eccentric conduct. If the person who
observed it had been of a superstitious turn of mind we should have had
here one of the finest and most terrifying ghost stories on the entire
record, which would have made an exceptionally splendid show in the
'Transactions of the Society for Psychical Research.' Unfortunately,
however, he was only a man of science, ungifted with the precious dower
of poetical imagination; so he stupidly called it a remarkable
fire-ball, measured the ground carefully like a common engineer, and
sent an account of the phenomenon to that far more prosaic periodical,
the 'Quarterly Journal of the Meteorological Society.' Another splendid
apparition thrown away recklessly, for ever!

There is a curious form of electrical discharge, somewhat similar to the
fire-ball but on a smaller scale, which may be regarded as the exact
opposite of the thunderbolt, inasmuch as it is always quite harmless.
This is St. Elmo's fire, a brush of lambent light, which plays around
the masts of ships and the tops of trees, when clouds are low and
tension great. It is, in fact, the equivalent in nature of the brush
discharge from an electric machine. The Greeks and Romans looked upon
this lambent display as a sign of the presence of Castor and Pollux,
'fratres Helenae, luci