A similar occurrence is stated to have been witnessed the same day at Blibery, a village seven miles from Bungay. In this case, the demon planted himself upon the rood-loft, from which he flung himself down into the church, and after killing two men and a lad, and burning the hand of another person, flew out of the church ‘in a hideous likeness.’
Before dismissing this story as a fable, bred of the imagination of people terror-stricken by the storm, let us compare it with the account of an occurrence which took place on Malvern Hills on the 1st of July 1826. A party had taken refuge in an iron-roofed hut from an impending storm, and were about to partake of refreshment when the storm came on. A gentleman who was standing at the eastern entrance—the storm had come from the west—saw what seemed to him to be a ball of fire moving along the surface of the ground. It came up and entered the hut, forcing him, as it did so, several paces forward from the doorway. An explosion followed, described by the inhabitants of the village at the foot of the hill (Great Malvern) as terrific. On going in, as soon as he had recovered from the shock, to look after his sisters, he found them on the floor, fainting, as he thought, from terror. Two of them had died instantly; and a third lady, with others of the party, were injured. An examination of the hut showed a large crack in the side opposite to that at which the fireball had entered, leading up to a window, and the iron roof above this was indented.
The correspondence of the leading circumstances of this account with Fleming’s story is remarkable; and had the Malvern incident occurred in the superstitious sixteenth century instead of the scientific nineteenth, it would no doubt have been regarded as a supernatural visitation, and have furnished just such a marvellous story as that of Bungay. In both cases, something was seen to enter a building during a thunderstorm, killing two persons instantly and injuring others, disappearing with a noise described in the one case as a violent clap of thunder, and in the other as a terrific explosion, and leaving behind visible marks of its progress in the material of the building. In each instance, too, a person stationed outside saw something which drove him from his place, but otherwise did not harm him; and in both cases the body, whatever it was, which seemed to be the immediate source of the mischief had a progressive motion, which, though swift, could be followed by the eye. The chief point of difference is in the appearance presented by the vehicle of the destructive agent. In the one case it is likened to a black dog, and in the other to a ball of fire, and it may be said that no two things could be more unlike. As to the form of the so-called dog, little need be said. It is admitted that the church at the time was in such a state of ‘palpable darknesse’ that one person could not perceive another; and in the dark, any ill-defined object that can be perceived at all has a tendency to assume a fantastic shape. It was accompanied by ‘fearful flashes of fire,’ which seem to be distinguished from the lightning, and the effect on those who were touched by it was that of scorching or burning. Whether the vehicle which brought the destructive force into the church, and which was thought to be a fiend, was a mass of highly charged smoke or dust, or a miniature cloud of the kind which, on a grand scale, passed over Malta on the 29th of October 1757, the effects described correspond so entirely with those known to result from a particular kind of thunderstroke, that we cannot accuse the author of writing otherwise than in good faith. The supernatural colouring may fairly be ascribed to want of knowledge in regard to a subject which, even now, is but imperfectly understood. The Malta storm-cloud, which destroyed nearly two hundred lives, and laid in ruins almost everything in its way, is described by Brydone as being at first black, afterwards changing its colour till it became like a flame of fire mixed with black smoke; but he reports that despite the scientific explanations of this extraordinary storm-cloud, the people declared with one voice that it was a legion of demons let loose to punish them for their sins. There were, says he, a thousand people in Malta that were ready to take their oath that they saw the fiends within the cloud, ‘all as black as pitch, and breathing out fire and brimstone.’
Besides those mentioned above, many other strange stories might be instanced which, at the time, were accepted as true accounts of supernatural appearances; and afterwards, when the general belief in spiritual manifestations declined, were denounced as false, because contrary to nature, but have since been recognised as consistent with natural laws. By taking into account the surrounding circumstances, the state of knowledge at the time, the customary modes of expression, &c., we may, from many stories at first sight incredible, arrive at a substratum of truth which may form a valuable addition to the sum of human knowledge. Imbued with a sense of their own superior wisdom, learned men, and others who have thought themselves learned, have sometimes rashly pronounced as impossible, and therefore untrue, phenomena which have since been accepted as facts. In Arago’s Popular Astronomy is an account of a meteorite which struck the earth at Lucé, in the year 1769. It was perceived in the sky by several persons, who watched its progress until it reached the surface of the earth, when it was at once picked up and preserved; but the Academy of Sciences pronounced it impossible for a solid body to have fallen from the heavens. On the 24th of July 1790, a quantity of these stones fell at St Juliac—in the fields, on the roofs of the houses, and in the streets of the village. The fall was preceded by what is described as the passing of a great fire, after which was heard in the air a very loud and extraordinary noise. The facts were certified by the municipality of the place and by some hundreds of the inhabitants; but the affair was treated in the public journals as a ridiculous tale, calculated to excite the compassion not merely of savants, but of all reasonable persons.
Modern scientific research, while continually giving us fresh revelations of that order in nature which is its supreme law, is at the same time constantly narrowing the domain of the impossible. Even the wild dreams of the alchemist appear, to the chemist and physicist of to-day, less groundless than they did eighty or a hundred years ago. The present century, the age of the railway, the electric light, the telegraph and telephone, is certainly not less replete with marvels than any of its predecessors. Many of the achievements of applied science, to which we have now become habituated, if they could have been related to a person living in the middle ages, would make as great demands upon his credulity as the most wonderful stories of past times do upon ours, and problems which have baffled the genius of all past ages, and the insolvability of which had come to be regarded as a matter of faith, have been solved in our own time. And yet we have no ground for assuming that we have approached a limit in the field of discovery, or for claiming finality in our interpretations of nature. We have lifted a corner of the curtain, and are enabled to peep at some of the machinery by which her operations are effected, but much more remains concealed, and we know not what marvels may yet in course of time be made clear to us. There are doubtless more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of—even in our philosophy.
BY ORDER OF THE LEAGUE.
BY FRED. M. WHITE.
IN TWENTY CHAPTERS.—CHAP. IV.
Five years have passed away, bringing strange changes and startling revolutions—years, to some, fraught with misery and regret; years, to others, which have been pregnant with fame and honour; but to the suffering, patient world, only another step nearer to eternity. Five years later, and night in the small German town where honour is wrecked and lives are lost on the hazard of a die. The Kursaal at Homburg sparkling with the glitter of ten thousand lights. Men of all nations were gathered there, drawn together by the strongest cords which bind human destiny—the power of gold. No type of face was wanting; no passion, no emotion that the human visage is capable of, but had its being there: rage, despair, misery, exultation—the whole gamut of man’s passions and triumphs. Women were there too. The bluest-blood recorded in the Almanach de Gotha did not disdain to rub elbows with the last fancy from the Comédie Française; my lord, cold, indifferent, and smiling, sat side by side with the reckless plunger who would have bartered his honour, had that commodity remained to him, for the gold to place upon the colour. On the long green tables, the glittering coins fell with a subdued chink sweeter than the finest music to the hungry ears; a republic the most perfect in the universe, where rich and poor alike are welcomed, with one great destiny—to lose or to gain. There were no wild lamentations there; such vulgar exhibitions were out of place, though feeling cannot be disguised under the deepest mask, for a tremor of the eyelid, a flash of the eye, a convulsive movement of the fingers, betray poor human nature. As the game proceeded with the monotonous cry of the croupier, it was awful to watch the intentness of the faces, how they deepened in interest as the game was made, bending forward till at length ‘Rouge perd et couleur’ came from the level voice again.
The croupiers raked in the glittering stacks of gold, silently, swiftly, but with as much emotion as a child would gather cowslips, and threw the winning on each stake as calmly, knowing full well that in the flight of time it must return. The piles were raked up, and then arose a murmur, a confusion of tongues, reminding the spectator of what the bewilderment at Babel must have been, a clamour which died away to silence at the inthralling ‘Faites votre jeu.’