A Pearl

Writing to Robert Gathorne-Hardy in 1929, Logan Pearsall Smith referred to an account in the London Times of a solar eclipse as seen from Manila: The weather was cloudless, the conditions were perfect. Acacia trees closed their leaves as for the night; dew fell, chickens roosted, and the peasants in outlying villages, terrified by the awful phenomenon, supplicated the Saints. Smith wrote, “Could this sentence, which Flaubert might have written with the help of Gibbon, be the chance product of a journalist’s pen? I cannot think so.” For the record, a Times archivist attributed the passage to Wi

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