g a storm, at Kilburn, July 5, 1877:

According to the _Kilburn Times_, July 7, 1877, quoted by Mr. Symons, a
street had been "literally strewn," during the storm, with a mass of
clinkers, estimated at about two bushels: sizes from that of a walnut to
that of a man's hand--"pieces of the clinkers can be seen at the
_Kilburn Times_ office."

If these clinkers, or cinders, were refuse from one of the
super-mercantile constructions from which coke and coal and ashes
occasionally fall to this earth, or, rather, to the Super-Sargasso Sea,
from which dislodgment by tempests occurs, it is intermediatistic to
accept that they must merge away somewhere with local phenomena of the
scene of precipitation. If a red-hot stove should drop from a cloud into
Broadway, someone would find that at about the time of the occurrence, a
moving van had passed, and that the moving men had tired of the stove,
or something--that it had not been really red-hot, but had been rouged
instead of blacked, by some absent-minded housekeeper. Compared with
some of the scientific explanations that we have encountered, there's
considerable restraint, I think, in that one.

Mr. Symons learned that in the same street--he emphasizes that it was a
short street--there was a fire-engine station. I had such an impression
of him hustling and bustling around at Notting Hill, searching cellars
until he found one with newly arrived coal in it; ringing door bells,
exciting a whole neighborhood, calling up to second-story windows,
stopping people in the streets, hotter and hotter on the trail of a
wretched imposter of a chemist's pupil. After his efficiency at Notting
Hill, we'd expect to hear that he went to the station, and--something
like this:

"It is said that clinkers fell, in your street, at about ten minutes
past four o'clock, afternoon of July fifth. Will you look over your
records and tell me where your engine was at about ten minutes past
four, July fifth?"

Mr. Symons says:

"I think that most probably they had been raked out of the steam
fire-engine."

June 20, 1880, it was reported that a "thunderstone" had struck the
house at 180 Oakley Street, Chelsea, falling down the chimney, into the
kitchen grate.

Mr. Symons investigated.

He describes the "thunderstone" as an "agglomeration of brick, soot,
unburned coal, and cinder."

He says that, in his opinion, lightning had flashed down the chimney,
and had fused some of the brick of it.

He doe