Entering by the window near which M. Penon--who was absent at the time--usually worked, the fluid grazed the bellows which were opposite, and caught up a piece of it, which one would have thought was cut off with a knife. Turning to the left, and passing behind a chain-maker, who felt a violent shock, it passed to a heap of chains which it did not damage much. All the links in a chain of about a metre long were, however, soldered together; the whole chain seemed to be galvanized, and the soldering was not easily broken by hand. Pieces of iron which had been cut and prepared for the manufacture, were found twisted and soldered together in the same way. Finally the lightning snatched the iron hoops from a tub, and, returning the same way, broke a piece of wood from a board, so as to go through the lower part of a partition, the masonry of which was carried away for a length of fifty centimetres. Very often lightning rivals the most skilful cabinet-makers: iron or copper nails are pulled out of a piece of furniture with a most amazing skill, without doing any harm to the material they kept in place. Ordinarily they are thrown far away. Here are two examples of this curious phenomenon:-- On September 23, 1824, lightning penetrated a house at Campbeltown; the copper nails in the chairs were pulled out very precisely, without the stuff being spoiled. Some were conveyed to the corner of a box standing at the opposite end of the room, others were so solidly fixed in the partitions, that it was only with great difficulty that they were pulled out (Howar). At another time, close to Marseilles, lightning slipped into a drawing-room, one might say, like a robber, one evening, and pilfered all the nails out of a couch covered with satin. Then it departed by the chimney through which it had entered. As for the nails, they were found, two years afterwards, under a tile! Locks, screws, door-knobs are frequently pulled out by the fluid. Sometimes metal objects of much larger size, such as forks or agricultural instruments, share the same fate. Violently torn out of the hands of their owners, they start upon an aerial voyage, borne on the incandescent wings of the wrathful lightning. Workers in the fields have often been warned of the dangers to which they expose themselves beneath a thundery sky, by carrying their implements with the point in the air. Each year the same accidents occur in precisely similar circumstances. The electric fluid, invited by the metal point which acts like a little lightning conductor, darts from the clouds upon this centre of attraction, and runs into the ordinary reservoir by the intermedial body of the man, who plays the _rôle_ of conductor.