"Oh, those were good old times, with all I wanted to eat all the time, and everything I ate turning to appetite! Too soon, too soon I found myself getting drowsy again, and, I can only remember awakening from a queer dream, to find even my six tiny legs gone, and, what is _worse_, my _mouth_ also. While wondering and hoping that this was but a troubled vision, I was plunged into sleep again, and dreamed that I was locked up in a mummy-case for over a week. And now comes the end, the cycle of my story. From this nightmare mummy-case I finally awoke--awoke, and emerged as you now see me. Do you wonder that I have had the blues ever since at the memory of those honeyed days, now forever fled? Instead of sporting aloft in airy skyward flights, I am now a miserable groundling. Instead of sweet, fragrant bread of flowers, I am now forced to break my fast on acrid buttercup leaves. But I shall live again, with joys several hundred times multiplied, live again in my children, for whose jolly time in the autumn I shall soon lay my plans--golden promises--here in the ground beneath the buttercup leaves, close to a burrow where lives a burly bumblebee. "But I have not told you all of my history, and will leave you to fill in the blank spaces, even as some of the scientists have to do." Fox-fire The most recent experience of my own with the mysterious fox-fire occurred a short time ago in a homeward drive with a companion from a botanizing expedition about twelve miles distant. It was near ten o'clock. The sky was overcast, only a stray star of the first magnitude now and then peeping out from between the rifts of hazy floating clouds. The new moon, "wi' th' auld moon i' her arm," had sunk below the western hills, and so dark had it become that the road ahead, at best but a faint suggestion, was occasionally lost for minutes together in the deepened gloom of the overhanging trees, only the keener nocturnal vision of the trusted horse affording the slightest hope of keeping in the wheel-tracks. In one of these dark passages we were suddenly surprised by a gleam of light a few rods ahead to the left, and in a moment more we were directly abreast of it. On many previous night-journeys I had been on the lookout for some such surprise as this, as yet only rewarded by the tiny sparkle of the glowworm in the grass. But here, at last, it came in a shape that I could not have anticipated--an upright column of phosphorescence, brilliant at the upper extremity, and more broken below for a space of several feet. The brilliancy of the light may be inferred from the following query and its answer: "What is that light yonder?" I asked my companion. "A lantern reflected in water," was his reply.