On Monday afternoon, the neighbourhood of Rochester was visited with
a thunderstorm, taking a direction of from North•west to South- east, and apparently following the course of the river Medway. The electric fluid struek the spire of Hoo church. The inhabitants quickly assembled, and, by ascending the steeple with buckets of water, con- trived to extinguish the fire which had broken out in the lower part : it had, however, caught fire nearer the top, and above where any one could ascend. On the arrival of the Sun and Kent engines from Rochester, it was found that neither of them could throw the water sufficiently high to extinguish the dames. The men at length esta- blished themselves with the hose on the roof of the tower, whence they played with good effect on the fire, and extinguished it at about eight o'clock, but not before from forty to fifty feet of the spire had been consumed. It is calculated that the damage will be repaired for about 600/. The clerk of the parish had a narrow escape, having fallen from the roof of the church into the churchyard, a distance of eighteen or twenty feet, but without sustaining any injury. [The principal expense attending the repair of the steeple of Ho° church will be the cost of the scaffolding ; but if th parish authorities apply to the Society of Arts in London, they will learn a very cheap mode of erecting a sufficient scaffold. A mast with an arm and pulley, which any blacksmith and carpenter in Hoo could make, are all that would be required. If we mistake not, Colonel Pasley, of the Engineers, procured a reward from the Society of Arts for the inventor of this most useful piece of cheap machinery.]
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