In the second place, I wish that I could say more about that mysterious phenomenon the firedrake, Saint Elmo's fire, or whatever it should be called, light-cloudlet, light-cloud, light-mass, light-ghost--sometimes it looks like luminous _mist_--but I know no more at this date about the origin of that most remarkable manifestation than I did after seeing the first "ghost," nor does Milton Rhodes himself, and Milton Rhodes, as everybody knows, is a scientist. Of course, if people were like Trimalchio in the _Satyricon_ of Petronius (and many people are) authors or scientists would not need to bother their heads about explanations, conjectures, theories, hypothesis or such sort when telling about strange phenomena or events; for, when some matter was being expounded by one of his guests, a gentleman by the name of Agamemnon, Trimalchio disposed of the whole business in this simple and summary fashion: "If the thing really happened, there is no problem; if it never happened, it is all nonsense." But, in the present instance--not to the Trimalchios, of course, but to any person with an iota of the scientific spirit in his encephalon--the fact is the very converse of this; for, if the firedrakes, the light-clouds, did not "happen," there would be no problem at all. The Trimalchios, I have no doubt, would at once put the stamp of their approval upon this statement, which I lift from _Hudibras_: "But what, alas! is it to us Whether i' th' moon men thus or thus Do eat their porridge, cut their corns, Or whether they have tails or horns?" But the light in that other world is not the only problem to the solution of which I wish that I had something to offer. There are many problems. Here is one: the "eclipses." These are sometimes truly awful. For instance, just imagine yourself in a forest dense and mysterious, and, furthermore, imagine that one of those fearful carnivores the snake-cats, is stealing toward you, stealing nearer and nearer, watching for the chance to spring; imagine yourself in such a pleasant pass as that, and then imagine a sudden and total extinction of the light (which is what, for want of a better word, we call an eclipse) so that you yourself and everything about you are involved in impenetrable darkness. How would you like to find yourself in such a place as that and have that happen to you? Well, as you will see in its proper pages, that is just where we were, and that, and more too, is just what happened to us. And _that_ will give you an idea of what I mean when I say an eclipse can sometimes be awful indeed. Why the light at times quivers, shakes, fades, bursts out so brightly, or why, slowly or all of a sudden, it ceases to be at all, is certainly an extremely curious and most mystifying business. But "To them we leave it to expound That deal in sciences profound."