It was at seven minutes before three that such few stragglers as the streets of York still contained saw a pear-shaped ball of fire traveling across the sky. It drenched the ancient city with a flood of light. The superb front of the minster never before glowed with a more romantic illumination. The unwonted brilliancy streamed through every aperture in every window in the city; every wakeful eye was instantly on the alert; every light sleeper started up suddenly to know what was the matter. Even those whom the blaze of midnight light had failed to awaken were only permitted to protract their slumbers for another minute and a half—only until an awful crash, like a mighty peal of thunder, burst over the town, shaking the doors, the windows, and even the houses themselves. The whole city was thus alarmed. Every one started at the noise. But that noise was not a clap of thunder. Nor was it produced by an earthquake. It was merely the explosion of the fire-ball which flung itself against the atmosphere after its immeasurable voyage through space. Perhaps the most remarkable instance of the _explosion_ of a meteor is recorded in the case of the great fire-ball so widely observed in America on the 21st of December, 1876. The movements of this superb object have been carefully studied by Professor H. A. Newton and Professor D. Kirkwood. For the prodigious span of a thousand miles this meteor tore over the American continent with a speed of some ten or fifteen miles a second. It first appeared over Kansas at a height of seventy-five miles. Thence it glided over the Mississippi, over the Missouri; it passed to the south of Lake Michigan; it made a short voyage over Lake Erie, and it can not have been very far from the Falls of Niagara, when by becoming invisible all further traces of its movements were lost. While passing a point midway between Chicago and St. Louis a frightful explosion shivered the meteor into a cluster of brilliant balls of fire, which seemed to chase each other across the sky. This cluster must have been about forty miles long and five miles wide. The detonation by which the explosion was accompanied was a specially notable incident of this meteor. It was not only heard with terrific intensity in the neighborhood, but the volume of sound was borne to great distances. The glory of a meteor is often so evanescent that we just get a glimpse and it is gone. The sky resumes its ordinary aspect; the familiar stars are there, and even the very situation of the brilliant streak has become unrecognizable. But this is not always so; it sometimes happens that the brief career of the meteor leaves a notable trace behind it, so that for seconds and for minutes the sky is diversified by an unwonted spectacle. The path of the meteor leaves a stain of pearly light on the sky to mark the highway pursued by our celestial visitor.