Showers of Blood

On 25 August 1826 Hone found fresh scarlet spots like blood on a letter lying by his open window, and took them for a specimen of the showers of blood that terrified people in the dark ages. The old chroniclers recorded that in the fifth century it rained blood at York, that corn gathered at harvest in 697 appeared bloody, and that it rained blood in the furthest parts of Scotland. Hone printed the explanation of the French scholar Peiresc, that such red drops were shed by butterflies newly come out of the chrysalis.