a hollow rumbling explosion, an immense slice
of the cliff, two hundred feet high, suddenly
driven as a crumbling, ever-expanding mass,
rolling further and further out to sea. But grand
although this sight was, in the eyes or the
thousands who came from far and near to
observe it, a spectacle of a far more terrible
grandeur occurred unseen on this very spot in the
evening of the 24th of last June.

There is a flagstaff on the brow of the
cliff. At a quarter to ten o'clock on the
Wednesday night of the storm, near this flag,
Thomas Bradley, the coast-guardsman from the
Cuckmere station, met "in conference" John
Dancer, the coast-guardsman from the East
Blatchington station. They were both on duty.
They conversed a short time together, and John
Dancer, who was about thirty-seven years of age,
with a wife and three children, was sober and
cheerful as usual. After the guardsmen parted,
amidst the thunder-storm, Thomas Bradley
turned round, and by a flash of lightning saw
John Dancer walking westward towards
Blatchington. Early on the following morning the
wife of John Dancer informed the chief boatman,
Mr. Bennet, that her husband had not come
home; and Mr. Bennet went to search for him
on the cliff, while William Fost went to search
on the beach under the cliff. The chief boatman
found the stick and sou'-wester hat of John
Dancer lying near the path, only a few yards
nearer the edge of the precipice; and about
twenty yards west of where they were,
underneath, at the bottom of the cliff, which is
here about two hundred feet high, the boatman
found his body lying on the beach. He had
fallen three or four yards from the bottom of
the cliff, as appeared from a mark on the beach,
and then had bounded or rolled four or five
yards more, dying on his back with his
comforter adjusted across his brow. His watch on
his left side, was uninjured and keeping good
time; his tobacco-box on his right side, was
flattened.

There was no trace of lightning about the
body. On the cliff, though several persons,
myself included, examined it carefully and
repeatedly, not the slightest mark could be
discerned of a man having lost his way after being
blinded or stunned, and having stumbled or fallen
over. He knew the path well, having gone over it
three or four times a week for thirteen months.
White chalk stones mark it, which can be seen,
as I have tested, after dark. No doubt, just at
the spot where the catastrophe occurred, the
ascent from the path to the precipice is not so
steep as lower down, yet he would have had to
ascend and go to the left to reach it, when for
safety he had only to roll down the steep green
sward on his right; there were no scratches on
his fingers, such as there must have been if he had
snatched or clutched at grass or chalk. There
was no wind that night, sufficient to take a man
off his legs. The exhaustive process of induction
we have pursued preventing our believing
without proof that he was confused and
stumbled over, or was driven over by the wind,
there remains but one imaginable explanation of
his death. This is, that he was swept over the
cliff by the lightning, which carried his sou'-
wester hat and stick in that direction.

The lightning, upon this hypothesis, was not
by its striking or burning, but by its lifting
power, the cause of the death of John Dancer.
He was not blinded, for his eyes were open and
unscathed. This lifting power of lightning has
long been well known to students of weather
wisdom. That I may not appear to be citing
marvellous stories to prove a marvel, I will merely
quote, in an abridged form, a paragraph
published months since in this journal: "That lightning
can throw heavy bodies considerable
distances with great force, is well known, but few
persons have any adequate idea of the weight of
the bodies transported, or of the force with which
they are projected. The Rev. George Low, of
Fetlar, in Scotland, records that at Funzie, in
his parish, a rock of mica schist, one hundred
and five feet long, and ten feet broad, was broken
in an instant into fragments, one of which was
simply turned over; another, twenty-eight feet
long, ten broad, and five thick, projected over an
elevated point a distance of fifty yards; and the
largest, about forty feet long, was sent still
further, but in the same direction, right into the
sea. Scarcely less surprising was the force
with which lightning split the mizenmast of the
Patriote, during the night of the 11th of July,
1852, in the port of Cherbourg. The mast was
split eighty feet down; and one fragment, six
and a half feet long, and about eight inches
square at the thicker end, was driven two
hundred and sixty-two feet and a half, and then
the thick end foremost through an oaken plank
one inch thick, nearly half its length, until
stopped by a knot."

When there is no other guess which fits in
with the evidence, a mechanical force like this
may with probability be found guilty of sweeping
a man over a precipice. Leaving Seaford
and East Blatchington, with the widow and three
children of poor John Dancer, and going up the
valley watered by the Ouse towards Lewes, we
approach the scene of another deplorable calamity.
Ranscombe Brow, a bold hill skirted by
the road from Lewes to Glynde (the village of
the glen), is situated about a mile and a half
from Lewes, and commands, even from the
road, an extensive view of the valley, both
inland and seaward. The road winds through
a wooded dell, and is darkened by very high and
very thick hedges on both sides. Nothing can
be seen except the sky. But, on issuing from
between the hedges, and rounding the brow, an
extensive flat landscape of pastures, watered by
the Ouse, startles the view. The effect is striking,
even on a fine summer afternoon, and must
have been appalling in the night and the early
morning of the 25th of June, when the darkness
of night increased the gloom between the hedges,
and when continuous lightning was enkindled all
over the extensive view. Shortly after eleven
o'clock on Wednesday night, a tradesman of
Glynde, Mr. Henry Mocket Weller, aged fifty-