However, the quips and cranks of lightning observed in dwellings are no less varied and curious.
One night during a terrible thunderstorm, lightning came down the chimney of a room where two people were asleep. The husband awoke with a start and, believing the house to be on fire, groped his way to the mantelpiece to get a candle, but was stopped by a heap of rubbish. Everything, in fact, of which the chimney had once consisted was heaped up in the middle of the room. The mantelshelf, violently torn off, had been partly melted, the clock had had the door of the case pulled off, and all the window-panes were broken. On the lower storey, another clock was similarly demolished, the floor was torn up and the tiles thrown with such force against the ceiling that there were splinters sticking all over it.
In the month of April, 1866, at Bure (Luxembourg), the thunder, which had been rumbling for some time, suddenly crashed down all at once about midnight with the most appalling violence, so that the ground seemed to tremble and the houses rock on their foundations.
All the inhabitants, aroused in terror; instinctively several of them sprang out of bed, thinking that their dwellings must be annihilated. Every one had the presentiment of disaster, which was only too real: the fluid had just struck the house of a poor workman, and left a scene of frightful destruction behind it.
The roof had been carried off, the chimney destroyed, the windows reduced, so to speak, to atoms, the principal door smashed and hurled to a distance; of the furniture there was nothing left but shapeless wreckage. But what was most extraordinary is, that this catastrophe only cost the life of one person, while all that were in the house might well have been killed.
Three children, sleeping in an upper storey, found themselves thrown outside the house without knowing how they got there, but _safe and sound_, though the bed was broken to pieces. The father and mother were asleep on the ground floor, with two little children, one of whom was at the breast. This latter was flung out of his cradle and thrown against the wall, without being hurt.
At this moment the mother sprang out of bed to succour those dear to her, but while the poor woman was in the act of lighting a candle, the lightning struck her lifeless on the floor. The husband, who was in the bed with another child, only felt a severe shaking. The lightning, having accomplished its work of destruction, finally broke an opening in the lower part of the wall, went into the stable adjoining the house, and there killed the only cow that was in it.