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Updated: May 24, 2025
Below him the road wound, a dimly conjectured, wavering gray ribbon; on the other side of it the steep slope took off to a gulf of inky shadow, where the great valley lay, hushed under the solemn stars, silent, black, and shimmering with a myriad pulsating electric lights which glowed like swarms of fireflies caught in an invisible net. That was Watauga.
Here in the open, away from the shadow of the trees, the full moon had changed the night-time into a wonderful, silver day. Narrow above and belows the stream widened before him into a fairy basin, rimmed with reeds, unruffled, crystal-clear, stiller than a dream. The trees that grew upon the farther side were faint gray clouds in the moonlight, and the gold of the fireflies was very pale.
We did not talk much during that drive, and though I thought at the time only of the carnival of joy we had left, I can now recall every detail of the trip how the sun sank behind Indian Mountain, a peak I had known before only through distant views; then, as we journeyed on, how the stars came out above Hemlock Mountain our own home mountain behind our house, and later, how the fireflies filled the darkening meadows along the river below us, so that we seemed to be floating between the steady stars of heaven and their dancing, twinkling reflection in the valley.
Our villa was situated in the midst of a podere; the peasants sang as they worked beneath our windows, during the heats of a very hot season, and in the evening the water-wheel creaked as the process of irrigation went on, and the fireflies flashed from among the myrtle hedges: Nature was bright, sunshiny, and cheerful, or diversified by storms of a majestic terror, such as we had never before witnessed.
All around them were orange- and lemon-trees, the fruit of which, in that strange coloured light of the fireflies, flashed in their eyes like balls of burnished gold and emerald; while great white tassels, swinging from every tree in the breeze which swept the glade, tossed in their faces a fragrant snow of blossoms and glittering drops of perfumed dew. It is thus that, like the oyster that conceals its scar beneath a pearl, Nature heals her wounds with loveliness.
He heard the occasional cry of the nightbirds and the booming of the surf on the reefs and the shore of the isle, and saw numerous fireflies flit to and fro, and that was all. "I don't believe they'll come back," he murmured to himself. "Like as not they are afraid to advance on the trail and also afraid to trust themselves to this jungle in the darkness."
At night she sang, sometimes mountain ditties to the accompaniment of the zither, leaning on the table and sweeping the wires between snatches of talk. Nothing haunted me so much as those tones of, her zither, which were little louder than summer gnats when fireflies are at their brightest and storm impends.
"Son carin', eh?" cried eager Marietta. "Hum yes pretty enough," he grudgingly acknowledged. "But even so?" the ingrate added, as he turned away, and let himself drop back into his lounging-chair. "My dear good woman, no amount of prettiness can disguise the fundamental banality of things. Your fireflies St.
That is my mountain peak that is my cleansing sea that is that in my life which needs no repenting, that is true, that is right! Oh, my wife, my wife!" The night wind blew against them. Fireflies shone and grey moths went by to the lighted windows; above the treetops a bat wheeled and wheeled. The clock struck again, then from far away a whippoorwill began to call.
"Good Lord!" ejaculated Dan, "ask a man who has lived two months on corn-field peas if he's eaten hog food, and he'll be pretty sure to answer 'yes. Do you know we must have crawled about six miles to-day." He lay back on the pine tags and stared straight above where the long green needles were illuminated on a background of purple space. A few fireflies made golden points among the tree-tops.
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