Eye Spy: Afield with Nature Among Flowers and Animate ThingsGibson, W. Hamilton (William Hamilton)
History
Eye Spy: Afield with Nature Among Flowers and Animate Things
Gibson, W. Hamilton (William Hamilton)
Insects; Natural history; Natural history -- Outdoor books
The mass of light shone verily like a lantern, and the present
interpretation was somewhat reminiscent of a previous flickering
lantern which we had seen, with its accompaniment of great magnified
moving shadows on barn and hay-stack, as it assisted in the tardy
chores of a whistling farmer lad.
But this light was of a greenish, ghostly hue, and perfectly
motionless, and had withal a certain weird, uncanny glare, which
belongs alone to fox-fire. It was impossible to locate its distance
from us. It might as easily be one rod as five. I concluded to
investigate its source, and, groping my way through the dewy bushes,
soon confronted it. It seemed to glow with added brilliancy as I
approached it, and as I stood face to face within a few inches of it
no vestige of material surface appeared to sustain it; it seemed
hanging motionless in mid-air. I reached out my hand, which
momentarily intervened like a black silhouette against the glow, with
which it soon came in contact. Upon further investigation, this proved
to be the contact of a mere prosaic fence-post, which, for some
mysterious reason, had been singled out for glorification among the
ten thousand others of its neighbors and transformed into a pillar of
fire. The post was about six inches in diameter, its summit an
unbroken mass of light, which extended in more or less broken patches
below for a distance of six feet, thus suggesting the effect of the
rippling elongated reflection of a lantern in water noticed by my
companion, and which would doubtless have been so accepted by the
average passing observer without further thought.
The most luminous upper portions were free from bark, the exposed
patches of wood below being equally brilliant. Clutching at the more
available part of the post, I was enabled to sink my fingers deep into
its decayed fibre, and succeeded in tearing off a long fragment. The
outer surface of this particular piece had been covered with bark and
not especially brilliant, but the cavity of yielding moist fibre thus
exposed, as well as the inner surface of the dislodged piece, poured
forth a perfect flood of greenish light, indicating that the damp
uncanny fire extended to the very core of the post, which was
saturated with the phosphorescent essence. I laid this and other
fragments in the back of the carriage, where its glare met our eyes
whenever we turned to look upon it.
Taking it beneath the lamp-light upon our return home, it resolved
itself into a very ordinary piece of yellowish rotten wood. In a more
shaded corner of the room it appeared as though white-washed, and upon
taking it into a closet or out into the night again its flame
gradually rekindled, as though feeding upon the darkness, until it
appeared precisely as when we found it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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