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Updated: May 24, 2025
Sometimes at night, after the day's work is over, the ducks have come home, and the stars have come out, she sits at the door of the boat-house, and watches the great bright fireflies over the marshes, and thinks of the blue lake Syhoo, covered with lilies, where gilded boats are sailing, and the people seem so happy.
It was a lovely night with a moon and stars, and a number of the boys were out on the river with their boats, skimming over the water like fireflies, and sending paths of colored light in every direction from their side lamps or with their pocket flashlights.
Fireflies blinked, and beyond the hazy fields rose the wasted moon, by the regal slowness of whose march I measured the passage of time as I had done two nights before. My vigil was a sad one, but, in health, in love, in the last of my teens and in the silent company of such a moon, my straying thoughts lingered most about the maiden who had "prayed for me." My hopes grew mightily.
At any moment, indeed, she might turn up; but the days passed the hypocritic days and she did not turn up. Marietta, the kind soul, noticing his despondency, sought in divers artless ways to cheer him. One evening she burst into his sitting-room with the effect of a small explosion, excitement in every line of her brown old face and wiry little figure. "The fireflies!
The Heer Pereira seemed extremely doubtful; so doubtful, indeed, that the Boers began to laugh at him. In the end he grew rather angry, and said that he was willing to shoot me at bucks or swallows, or fireflies, or anything else I liked. "Then let it be at geese," I answered, "since it is likely to be sometime before I am strong enough to ride after buck or other wild things."
Colonel Churchill, in his especial chair, was smoking like a benevolent volcano; at a small table Major Edward was playing Patience. On the broad porch steps below Jacqueline and Unity half sat, half lay, the two Carys. The fireflies were beginning to show, and out of the distance came a plaintive Whip-poor-will Whip-poor-will!
Without, the night was indeed cooler, with a sighing wind, and in the west a thickening wrack of clouds. It was very dark. The restless and multitudinous flicker of the fireflies but emphasized the shadow, and the stars seemed few and dim. It was near midnight, and the wide landscape below the mountain lay in darkness, save for one distant knoll where lights were burning.
A few fireflies were flitting about the grass, but I felt sure the gleam just witnessed proceeded from a fire; and after vainly trying to catch sight of it again from my seat on the ground, I rose and walked on, keeping before me a particular star shining directly over the spot where that transient glimmer had appeared.
Often in the evening, after school hours, we would sit on the trunk of some fallen tree in the woods, and vie with each other in telling extravagant stories, until the whip-poor-will began his nightly moaning, and the fireflies sparkled in the gloom. Then came the perilous journey homeward.
And as the combatants rushed against one another, smiting and slashing, thick clouds of dust began to rise, so that nothing could be discovered. And covered with the dust raised by the contending armies, birds began to drop down on the earth. And the sun himself disappeared behind the thick cloud of arrows shot, and the firmament looked bright as if with myriads of the fireflies.
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