In 1898, at Courcelles-les-Sens, Mlles. Philomène Escalbert, aged 19, Adèle Delauffre, aged 22, and Madame Léonie Legère, aged 44, were standing round a reaping-machine, when a flash of lightning struck Madame Legère and killed her on the spot. The two young girls were stripped to the skin, even their boots being torn from their feet. Otherwise they were left safe and sound--and astonished. On October 1, 1868, seven persons took refuge during a storm under a huge ash-tree near the village of Bonello, in the Commune of Perret (Côtes-du-Nord), when suddenly the tree was struck by lightning, and one of them--a woman--was killed. The six others were knocked to the ground without being seriously damaged. The clothes of the woman who had been killed were torn into shreds, many of which were found clinging to the branches of the tree. On May 11, 1869, a farmer at Ardillats was tilling the ground with his two oxen, not far from his dwelling-place, about four in the afternoon. The air was close and heavy, and the sky covered with black clouds. Suddenly there was a great thunderclap, and a flash of lightning struck both man and beasts dead on the spot. The man was found stripped to the skin, and his boots had been carried thirty yards away. In July, 1896, at Epervans (Saône-et-Loire), a young man named Petiot, who was mowing in a meadow, was struck dead by lightning while lighting a cigarette, and left in a state of complete nakedness. On August 11, 1855, a man was struck by lightning near Vallerois (Haute-Saône), and stripped naked. All that could be found afterwards of his clothes was a shirt-sleeve, a few other shreds, and some pieces of his hobnailed boots. Ten minutes after he was struck he regained consciousness, opened his eyes, complained of the cold, and inquired how he happened to be naked. There is no telling what lightning will not do. Sometimes it will snatch things out of your hand and carry them right away. There is a case of a mug being thus spirited away from a man, who had just been drinking out of it, and deposited undamaged in a courtyard near--the man himself suffering no injury. A youth of eighteen, holding up a missal from which he is singing, has it torn out of his hands and destroyed. A whip is whisked out of a rider's hand. Two ladies, quietly knitting, have their knitting-needles stolen. A girl was sitting at her sewing-machine, a pair of scissors in her hand; a flash of lightning, and her scissors are gone and she is sitting _on_ the sewing-machine. A farmer's labourer is carrying a pitchfork on his shoulder; the lightning seizes it, carries it off fifty yards or so, and twists its two prongs into corkscrews. On July 22, 1878, at Gien (Nievre), a woman while sprinkling her house with holy water during a storm, saw her holy-water bottle smashed actually in her fingers by the lightning, which at the same time smashed up the tiled pavement of the room.