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Updated: June 19, 2025
I shall never forget her as she stood looking at me, her steel-clad figure half buried in the darkness, yet dimly apparent in its youthful symmetry where the starlight fell on the curve of cuisse and greave, glimmering on the inlaid gorget with an unearthly light, and stirring pale sparks like fire-flies tangled in her hair. "Did I please you?" she whispered. "Did I not surprise you?
Sometimes the Indians, when they travel at night, fix fire-flies to their feet, and so have good lamps to their path." While Barney was expressing his surprise at this information, in very racy language, they entered the village; and, mingling with the throng of holiday-keepers, followed the stream towards the grand square.
The walls of the cleft or tunnel were perpendicular, smooth and shining with a cold, metallic, greenish glow. Between the walls, like rhythmic flashing of fire-flies, pulsed soft and fugitive glimmerings that carried a sense of the infinitely minute of electrons, it came to me, rather than atoms.
If I suggested 'Fire-flies, they at once approved the topic, and wrote for me the story of that Chinese student who, being too poor to pay for a lamp, imprisoned many fireflies in a paper lantern, and thus was able to obtain light enough to study after dark, and to become eventually a great scholar.
He lives his life in the topmost boughs of an African palm a feathered dome amid the forest and there beneath the blue sky he browses till he descends into the warm earth to sleep in chrysalis form before he emerges as a splendid moth, with glass windows in his wide wings to sail with the fire-flies through the dark vaults of the silent woods." "All that from a caterpillar?"
"Why, those must be fire-flies," cried Reggy. "They are far too red and bright for that," whispered Paul; "don't speak above your breath. The lights come from the fire-sticks carried by natives, they always move about with them by night, and they are gathering round the water-hole.
Pierre did not mean to pay a compliment; he was merely thinking. She made a little gesture of deprecation. "I was a child," she said. Pierre lifted a shoulder slightly. "What matter? It is sex that I mean. What difference to me five, or forty, or ninety? It is all sex. It is only lovers, the hunters of fire-flies, that think of age mais oui!"
One evening Sir Charles was dining at the bungalow, and, having got over his nervous doubts, upon hearing Minnie express a desire to go up the river and see the fire-flies first, and the rising of the moon after, the Resident at once proposed to have his smaller boat prepared, with a couple of his most trusty native servants to pole it a short distance up the river, and then bring the Doctor and the two ladies back to supper at the Residency.
There were no clapping hands, but rather the beating of wings, the enthusiastic croaking from various kinds of little red throats, and the flash-flash of lights from the Fire-Flies and Glow-Worms. Mr. Cricky in writing it up for the June Bug Journal pronounced it the success of the season. We will close with a few stanzas of "There's Dreamland Coming."
But before the moon's round face peeped above the hill to destroy her hope, Nan had fallen asleep, leaning back in a little bower of tall ferns, and was deep in a mid-summer night's dream of fire-flies and blue aprons, mountains of huckleberries, and Robby wiping away the tears of a black cow, who sobbed, "I want to go home! I want to go home!"
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