
The Green Meadow
The Green Meadow
by H. P. Lovecraft and Winifred V. Jackson
Written 1918/19
Published Spring 1927 in The Vagrant, p. 188-95
(INTRODUCTORY NOTE: The following very singular narrative, or record of
impressions, was discovered under circumstances so extraordinary that they deserve
careful description. On the evening of Wednesday, August 27, 1913, at about eight-thirty
o'clock, the population of the small seaside village of Potowonket, Maine, U.S.A., was
aroused by a thunderous report accompanied by a blinding flash; and persons near the
shore beheld a mammoth ball of fire dart from the heavens into the sea but a short
distance out, sending up a prodigious column of water. The following Sunday a fishing
party composed of John Richmond, Peter B. Carr, and Simon Canfield, caught in their
trawl and dragged ashore a mass of metallic rock, weighing 360 pounds, and looking (as
Mr. Canfield said) like a piece of slag. Most of the inhabitants agreed that this heavy
body was none other than the fireball which had fallen from the sky four days before; and
Dr. Richard M. Jones, the local scientific authority, allowed that it must be an aerolite or
meteoric stone. In chipping off specimens to send to an expert Boston analyst, Dr. Jones
discovered imbedded in the semi-metallic mass the strange book containing the ensuing
tale, which is still in his possession.
In form the discovery resembles an ordinary note-book, about 5 X 3 inches in size, and
containing thirty leaves. In material, however it presents marked peculiarities. The covers
are apparently of some dark stony substance unknown to geologists, and unbreakable by
any mechanical means. No chemical reagent seems to act upon them. The leaves are
much the same, save that they are lighter in colour, and so infinitely thin as to be quite
flexible. The whole is bound by some process not very clear to those who have observed
it; a process involving the adhesion of the leaf substance to the cover substance. These
substances cannot now be separated, nor can the leaves be torn by any amount of force.
The writing is Greek of the purest classical quality, and several students of palaeography
declare that the characters are in a cursive hand used about the second century B. C.
There is little in the text to determine the date. The mechanical mode of writing cannot be
deduced beyond the fact that it must have resembled that of the modern slate and slate-
pencil. During the course of analytical efforts made by the late Professor Chambers of
Harvard, several pages, mostly at the conclusion of the narrative, were blurred to the
point of utter effacement before being read; a circumstance forming a well-nigh
irreparable loss. What remains of the contents was done into modem Greek letters by the
palaeographer, Rutherford, and in this form submitted to the translators.
Professor Mayfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who examined samples
of the strange stone, declares it a true meteorite; an opinion in which Dr. von Winterfeldt
of Heidelberg (interned in 1918 as a dangerous enemy alien) does not concur. Professor
Bradley of Columbia College adopts a less dogmatic ground; pointing out that certain