Lovecraft, H P & Jackson, Winifred - The Green Meadow

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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

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Lovecraft, H P & Jackson, Winifred - The Green Meadow

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