The little village of Candes, situated by the confluence of the Vienne and the Loire, was the scene of the appearance of a fireball in June, 1897. Three persons were sitting in the verandah of a house during a storm, when they suddenly saw a fireball travelling past them through the air for a distance of thirty yards or so. Then it exploded with a loud noise, striking sparks from the ironworks of the verandah. At the same moment, the servants saw another fireball cross a garden at the other side of the house, and drop into a small pond. A gardener was knocked over, but not hurt. On March 6, 1894, M. Dandois, professor of surgery at the University of Louvain, went to the neighbouring town of Linden, by railway, to see a patient. On his return, on foot, the sky suddenly so darkened over, that he made for the nearest dwelling-place, avoiding, as he did so, the telegraph poles along the road. Suddenly a ball of fire came against him and threw him over a ditch into a field, where he lay unconscious. A quarter of an hour later, having regained his senses and finding himself undamaged save for a numbness in one arm and one leg, the doctor set out again, congratulating himself on the fact that his umbrella had acted as a sort of portable lightning conductor, for the steels were all twisted, and showed signs of having borne the brunt of the fray. Had the handle been of steel also, the electric current would have run down it into his hand, doubtless, and killed him. On another occasion a fireball fell upon the door of a house, pushed it violently open, and made its way into the kitchen. At the sight of this strange visitor, the cook bolted from the room. A sempstress, who was at work near the window, received a small burn on her forehead, of about the size of half a franc, with a slight weal a couple of inches long--like the tail of a comet. After bursting, the fireball made its way up the chimney, from which it removed a mass of soot, smelling somewhat of sulphur. Here is an instance more curious still-- A violent storm was raging near Marseilles, when seven persons, seated together in the ground-floor drawing-room of a country house, saw a fireball as big as a plate appear in their midst. It directed its course towards a young girl of eighteen, who, frightened out of her life, had fallen on her knees. Touching her shoes, it rebounded to the ceiling, then came down to her feet again, and so on two or three times, with mysterious regularity, the girl experiencing, it seems, no other sensation than that of a slight cramp in her legs. Eventually the fireball made its exit from the room through a keyhole! The girl could not get up at once after it had gone. For a fortnight or so she could not walk without assistance, and it was two years before she got over a liability to sudden weakness in her legs, causing her suddenly to fall.