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Updated: May 6, 2025
Seen from a distance in the blackness of the night these companies resembled a regiment of glow-worms in a potato patch. From over the flint hills in the distance came the familiar rattle and rumble of old-fashioned lumber wagons whose occupants had come far to hear the much-discussed preacher from "over east."
Disappointed maidens that hover on the verge of forty, and can sympathize with Jephtha's daughter in her lonely mournings, causelessly begin to fear that a mischievous author may appropriate their portraits; venerable bachelors, who have striven to earn some little local notoriety by the diligent use of an odd phrase, a quaint garment, or an eccentric fling in the peripatetic, dread a satirist's powers of retributive burlesque; table orators suddenly grow dumb, for they suspect such a caitiff intends cold-blooded plagiarisms from their eloquence; the twinkling stars of humble village spheres shun him for an ominous comet, whose very trail robs them of light, or as paling glow-worms hide away before some prying lantern; and all who have in one way or another prided themselves on some harmless peculiarity, avoid his penetrating glance as the eye of a basilisk.
Still hauling in the ladder with one hand, he held out the other, on which luminous wisps were writhing like glow-worms' ghosts. "You are responsible," he said. "You gave me an excellent idea, and I was obliged to carry it out." "What have you done?" "Arranged a fearsome bogey in the cave." "But how?"
In their lives they are without a friend; for society in guilt brings nought of comfort, and honours are but emptiness: Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright; But looked to near, have neither heat nor light. Their plots and counterplots drive repose far from them: There's but three furies found in spacious hell; But in a great man's breast three thousand dwell.
I remembered Stevenson's shipwrecked crew who gambled all night on Medway Island by the light of a fire of driftwood. I thought of the men in Hardy's story who finished their game on the grass by the light of a circle of glow-worms. Our position was uncomfortable but picturesque. Another orderly came in and said that the camp adjutant was wanted at once in his office.
The white blossoms of a cherry-tree had become changed into turquoise, and the tossing spray of a fountain as it drifted and swung was like a column of blue fire. Where a long inlet of sea reached in and touched the feet of the hanging gardens the stars showed like glow-worms, emerald in a floor of amethyst.
We have been lost in the blackness of night, sunk in the depths of a hell-like gloom but lo! now the clouds have broken in the east, and our hearts rejoice at the birth of day! Vanish, dull moon, and be ashamed! ... for a fairer planet rules the sky! Hence, ye stars! ... puny glow-worms lazily crawling in the fields of ether! Lysia invests the heaven and earth, and in her smile we live!
After a short time the phenomenon was repeated, not once or twice, but several times; at last the scientific gentleman, laying down his pen, began to consider to what natural causes these appearances were to be assigned. They were not meteors; they were too low. They were not glow-worms; they were too high. They were not will-o'-the-wisps; they were not fireflies; they were not fireworks.
"I have no idea how long I slept: there is neither day nor night down there, only a dim sort of twilight, which at times becomes illuminated by the phosphorescent rays of fishes, or the fitful gleam of ocean glow-worms. I was startled from my swoon by a rattling, dragging noise, and came very near being scooped up by an uncouth-looking iron thing which was attached to a cable.
There are some of them of the dog species, but those are not worth mentioning. I sat there on the cupboard, and had all the twelve little new-born Will-o'-the-Wisps upon my lap. They shone like glow-worms; they already began to hop, and increased in size every moment, so that before a quarter of an hour had elapsed, each of them looked just as large as his father or his uncle.
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