It has no records of such falls.
So a dragnet that was let down from above somewhere—
Or something that I learned from the more scientific of the investigators of psychic phenomena:
The reader begins their works with prejudice against telepathy and everything else of psychic phenomena. The writers deny spirit-communication, and say that the seeming data are data of "only telepathy." Astonishing instances of seeming clairvoyance—"only telepathy." After a while the reader finds himself agreeing that it's only telepathy—which, at first, had been intolerable to him.
So maybe, in 1896, a super-dragnet did not sweep through this earth's atmosphere, gathering up all the birds within its field, the meshes then suddenly breaking—
Or that the birds of Baton Rouge were only from the Super-Sargasso Sea—
Upon which we shall have another expression. We thought we'd settled that, and we thought we'd establish that, but nothing's ever settled, and nothing's ever established, in a real sense, if, in a real sense, there is nothing in quasiness.
I suppose there had been a storm somewhere, the storm in Florida, perhaps, and many birds had been swept upward into the Super-Sargasso Sea. It has frigid regions and it has tropical regions—that birds of diverse species had been swept upward, into an icy region, where, huddling together for warmth, they had died. Then, later, they had been dislodged—meteor coming along—boat—bicycle—dragon—don't know what did come along—something dislodged them.
So leaves of trees, carried up there in whirlwinds, staying there years, ages, perhaps only a few months, but then falling to this earth at an unseasonable time for dead leaves—fishes carried up there, some of them dying and drying, some of them living in volumes of water that are in abundance up there, or that fall sometimes in the deluges that we call "cloudbursts."
The astronomers won't think kindly of us, and we haven't done anything to endear ourselves to the meteorologists—but we're weak and mawkish Intermediatists—several times we've tried to get the aeronauts with us—extraordinary things up there: things that curators of museums would give up all hope of ever being fixed stars, to obtain: things left over from whirlwinds of the time of the Pharaohs, perhaps: or that Elijah did go up in the sky in something like a chariot, and may not be Vega, after all, and that there may be a wheel or so left of whatever he went up in. We basely suggest that it would bring a high price—but sell soon, because after a while there'd be thousands of them hawked around—