Suddenly, without hearing or seeing anything, the father felt the straw move under his feet; he turned mechanically, and gave a great cry on seeing his little daughter stretched motionless on the ground. She was dead. Her little corset was unsewn and her chemise burnt. But of all the fantastic actions of lightning, the most extraordinary and incomprehensible is the mania it has for undressing its victims, and leaving them dead or fainting in the primitive costume of our first parents--or in a dress too simple to be allowed by our civilized customs. This deplorable and quite inexplicable habit has given lightning a large scientific _dossier_, from which we have already cited examples in the first chapter, and from which we will again extract some fragments. Near Angers, on May 12, 1901, a farm lad named Rousteau, aged twenty-three, was killed by lightning in the middle of the fields. The corpse was found nearly naked. On June 29, 1869, at Pradettes (Ariège), the Mayor was unfortunate enough to take shelter under a very high poplar. Soon after he had done so, there was a burst of lightning which split the tree and struck him. In one of its diabolical freaks it entirely undressed him, throwing his various garments round about him, reduced to rags, with the exception of one shoe. In June, 1903, at Saint-Laurent-la-Gatine, thunder broke over M. Fromentin while he was working a plough drawn by three horses. Lightning killed the leader, and completely undressed M. Fromentin after burning his hat. The same day, at Limoges, a farm servant named Barcelot was struck under an oak. His corpse was completely naked and he had a severe wound on his left side. On August 20 of the same year, a violent storm burst over the Isle of Re. A farmer, who was on his way to the station at Finaud, was struck fifty yards from his own house. The lightning removed all his clothes. In 1894 the keeper of the Commune of Saint-Cyr-en-Val, near Orleans, was struck while on his rounds; the fluid deprived him of his clothes and removed all the nails from one of his shoes. On July 1903, at Aseras, near Nice, during a violent storm with hailstones 350 grammes in weight, a Mme. Blanc was on her way to meet a servant who was in the fields. She had only taken a few steps when she was struck by lightning and completely undressed. Her body was uninjured, but the poor woman became dumb. How fantastic and extravagant it is! It is impossible to assign any rule to the capricious advance of lightning. How are we to explain the following facts of nature?