field of battle had been simultaneously discharged
that night, the combined sound would have been
as a whisper compared to the roar of heaven's
artillery that thundered in the skies. We once
in a harbour fired a starboard broadside, to burst
the gall and bring up to the surface of the
water the dead body of an officer who was
unhappily drowned in coming off to the ship. It
shook to their very foundation the walls of a
fortress, and broke the windows of every house
within a quarter of a mile from us, not excepting
those of the Government House; but I am
quite sure that if every cannon on board had
been fired that night, we in the top would
have been ignorant thereof, except from the
shaking of the vessel, so awfully loud was
the thunder.  We had lightning-conductors, of
course, and on the decks were various metallic
substances which attract, or are supposed to
attract, lightning; but neither the ship, nor any
one on board of her, was injured, albeit we
frequently saw the forked fluid descend into the
waves at no great distance from us.

I could not help looking at the faces of the
men, as they lay along the yard, tying the reef
knots. Not one of them exhibited any fear,
nor anything approaching bravado.   There was
no talking aloft, but after we returned to the
deck I took an opportunity of asking a man,
who was a great favourite of mine, what he felt
on the occasion?  "Well, sir," he replied, "to
tell you the truth, I should not have liked to
have been up there all alone, but where there's
so many on a yard it makes all the difference;
the chances are, if the yard is struck, you may
not be the man who is killed."   And this
appeared to be the general feeling of the men. In
proportion to the number of sharers in the danger
individual fears diminish.

Up to that night the thunderstorm, to which
I have just alluded, was the heaviest that I had
ever seen, on land or at sea. Since then I
have travelled round and over the whole world,
and in some climates have witnessed storms
which in their grandeur have eclipsed any that
I witnessed off the coast of New Holland, or in
the interior of that colony.

In the harbour of Rio, I once saw a very
pretty and very grand thunderstorm, which
lasted the whole night and the following day
without intermission. The lightning, however,
was chiefly "sheet lightning," though now and
then "chained" or "forked" was visible, and
not far off.

On the coast of Java and Sumatra, these
storms are so frequent that it must be, indeed, an
awful one to attract attention. Such a storm I
saw in 1842. We were in sight of land, though
twenty miles distant. It was just such a storm
as the Shannon encountered in the same latitude,
when the late Captain Peel was taking her to
the East. (A description of it appeared in
several of the illustrated papers.)

During a residence of several years in
Calcutta I did not witness more than two thunder-
storms that made any impression on me. Of
course I saw, in the course of every summer, at
least a dozen that would be considered
"frightfully heavy" in Europe, but the reader will be
pleased to remember that I am speaking
comparatively, and that since my return to Europe
I have really "missed" my Australian and
Asiatic thunder. The Calcutta storms twisted
every lightning conductor on almost every
building, public and private, and killed
numbers of those valuable birds as scavengers,
commonly called adjutants. The loss of human life,
however, was very trifling. Two natives in the
bazaar only were killed. No one ever heard, I
believe, of a European being killed in Calcutta
by lightning, although numbers of vessels in the
Hooghly have been struck and set on fire.
During a residence of six years in the upper
provinces of India, I witnessed only three great
storms. One was at Meerut, in 1847; one at
Agra, in 1849; and one at Benares, in 1851.

The Meerut storm was very grand in tone,
loudness, and light, but the country was too flat,
and not sufficiently picturesque, to give it any
"loveliness" to the eye. There was nothing
to light up but a few bungalows and moderately
sized trees. Some cattle were killed, and a few
goats; but only one man, a native, was injured.

The Agra storm, which I witnessed from the
lofty battlements of the fortress, I would not
have missed on any account. The thunder was
loud, long, and rolling; the lightning (sheeted)
almost red, and the "chained," or "forked,"
pale blue, and when you looked at it and
watched it, you experienced a sensation of
coldness—real coldness—not the coldness that
is often the result of fear; it cooled the blood
and the marrow in the bones, without fluttering
the heart, or making the nerves tremble. And
here, too, the scenery, in the strict sense of the
word, failed. But there was one glorious object
that the lightning tore from the darkness of
night, and revealed to my eyes and those of the
friend who stood with me on that large, black
marble stone, on which Ackbar Shah used to
sit—that stone which was struck by lightning
and split across, in the reign (I think) of
Aurungzebe.  (The Hindoos, of course, regarded
the breaking of that stone as an omen
foretelling the fall of the Mahommedan dynasty.)

What was the one glorious object? It was
the snow-white marble walls of the Taj Mahal,
with the broad stream of the river Jumna
laving their foundation. Every minaret was
distinctly visible, and with an opera-glass I
could trace the gigantic Arabic characters
inscribed on the centre building, and descry in the
distant fields the golden ears of corn waving in
the gentle breeze, until the hail came and
battered them. Numbers of oxen were killed by
the hail, but the lightning, which lasted the
whole night, did not destroy a single human life.

The Benares storm I had the joy of beholding
from the minarets. That storm was also in the
night, and was grand to the last degree.   But, like
the .Meerut and Agra storms, it wanted scenery.

The storms in Italy and Switzerland are very
beautiful, and well worthy of those glorious
stanzas of Lord Byron, beginning