About this time Virginia City was visited one day by a heavy rain storm accompanied with thunder. But as the sun was disappearing behind Mount Davidson, the clouds broke and rolled away from the west, while at the same time a faint rainbow appeared in the East, making one of those beautiful spectacles common to mountainous regions. At the same time the flag on Mount Davidson caught the beams from the setting sun and stood out a banner of fire. This, too, is not an unfrequent spectacle in Virginia City, and long ago inspired a most gifted lady to write a very beautiful poem, "The Flag on Fire." The storm and the sunset turned the minds of the Club to other beautiful displays of nature which they had seen. Said Miller, "I never saw anything finer than a sunset which I witnessed once at sea down off the Mexican coast. "We were in a tub of a steamship, the old "Jonathan." We had been in a storm for four days, three of which the steamer had been thrown up into the wind, the machinery working slowly, just sufficient to keep steerageway on the ship. "There were 600 passengers on board, with an unusual number of women and children, and we had been miserable past expression. But at last, with the coming of the dawn, the wind ceased; as soon as the waves ran down so that it was safe to swing the ship, she was turned about and put upon her course. "In a few hours the sea grew comparatively smooth, and the passengers by hundreds sought the deck. "All the afternoon the Mexican coast was in full view, blue and rock-bound and not many miles away. "Just before the sun set its bended rays struck those blue head-lands and transfigured them. They took on the forms of walls and battlements and shone like a city of gold rising out of the sea in the crimson East, and looked as perhaps the swinging gardens of Semiramis did from within the walls of Babylon. In the West the disc of the sun, unnaturally large, blazed in insufferable splendor, while in glory this seeming city shone in the East. Between the two pictures the ship was plunging on her course and we could feel the pulses of the deep sea as they throbbed beneath us. The multitude upon the deck hardly made a sound; all that broke the stillness was the heavy respirations of the engines and the beating of the paddles upon the water. The spell lasted but a few minutes, for when the sun plunged beneath the sea, the darkness all at once began as is common in those latitudes, but while it lasted it was sublime. "Speaking of Nature's pictures, in my judgment about the most impressive sight that is made in this world, is a storm at sea. I mean a real storm in which a three thousand ton ship is tossed about like a cork, when the roar of the storm makes human voices of no avail, and when the billows give notice that 'deep is answering unto deep.'