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It having been a very fine clear frosty day-God send us more of them! for the warm weather all this winter makes us fear a sick summer. But thanks be to God, since my leaving drinking of wine, I do find myself much better and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company. 27th.

When I grew tired of observing him, and looked toward the sky again, behold the western ridge, which is far higher than the eastern hills, had caught upon its summits the first bright rays of the yet unseen day-god; while the rosy flush of the east had brightened into a blaze of living gold, exceeded only by the glorious hues with which a few bright specks of misty cloud glowed out against the azure firmament, like coals of actual fire.

As the sun rose above the horizon, the sky presented a magnificent spectacle. Every shade of saffron, gold, rose-color, scarlet, and crimson, mottled with the deepest violet, were blended there as on some enormous tapestry. It was the storm-fiend who shook that gorgeous banner in the face of the day-god!

It having been a very fine clear frosty day-God send us more of them! for the warm weather all this winter makes us fear a sick summer. But thanks be to God, since my leaving drinking of wine, I do find myself much better and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company. 27th.

It would be as wise to describe the season of Spring with no note of the silent influences of that burning Day-god which is melting day by day the shattered ice-drifts of Winter, which is filling every bud with succulence, and painting one flower with crimson, and another with white.

Eclipses and earthquakes and floods are phenomena of the most terrible and astounding kind, and they have all generated myths; yet their contributions to folk-lore are scanty compared with those furnished by the strife between the day-god and his enemies. The sun-myths have been so prolific because the dramatic types to which they have given rise are of surpassing human interest.

Against the sombre mass of tree-foliage, white and purple altheas raised their circular censers, as if to greet the sun that was throwing level beams from the eastern hill-top, and delicate pink, and deep azure, and pearl-pale convolvulus held up their velvet trumpets all beaded with dew, to be drained by the first kiss of the great Day-God.

A half-page display ad. with wood-cut portrait of a chamber- set occupying the foreground and the clare-obscure worked up with various sizes and styles of black type, possesses far more charm for him than does the deep blue of our Southern sky, whose mighty concave seems to reach to Infinity's uttermost verge; a two-story brick livery stable or laundry is to him far more interesting than the splendors of the Day-god rising from the ocean's blue; an eighty-cent dollar with its lying legend more beautiful in his eyes than even Austin's violet crown bathed in the radiance of the morning or arched with twilight's dome of fretted gold.

He sauntered out into the glare of the evening sunshine and became slowly conscious of a desire to swear at what he saw: that, though in a minute or two the day-god would "douse his glim" behind the black horizon, no preparation whatever had been made for a start. There stood the ambulance, every bolt and link and tire hot as a stove-lid, but not a mule in sight.

Myths of the daybreak and myths of the lightning often resemble each other so closely that, except by a delicate philological analysis, it is difficult to distinguish the one from the other. The reason is obvious. In each case the phenomenon to be explained is the struggle between the day-god and one of the demons of darkness.