The country folk, who are much about at night and naturally pay great heed to the weather, are persuaded that on rainy nights more shooting stars are seen than when it is bright and clear. The kind of weather they mean is when scudding clouds with frequent breaks pass over, now obscuring and now leaving part of the sky visible, and with occasional showers. These shooting stars, they say, are but just above the clouds, and are mere streaks of light: by which they mean to convey that they have no apparent nucleus and are different from the great meteors which are sometimes seen. I have myself been often much interested in the remarkable difference of the degree of darkness when there has been no moon. There are nights when, although the sky be clear of visible cloud and the stars are shining, it is, in familiar phrase, `as black as pitch.' The sky itself is black between the stars, and they do not seem to give the slightest illumination. On the other hand, there are nights without a moon when it is (though winter time) quite light. Hedges and trees are plainly visible; the road is light, and anything approaching can be seen at some distance, and this occasionally happens though the sky be partly clouded. So that the character of the night does not seem to depend entirely upon the moon or stars. The shepherds on the hills say that now and then there comes an intense blackness at night which frightens the sheep and makes them leap the hurdles. When logs of timber are split for firewood they are commonly stacked `four square,' and occasionally such a stack, four or five feet high, may be seen all aglow with phosphorescence. Each individual split piece of wood is distinctly visible--a pale faintly yellow light seems to be emitted from its surface. At the same time the ends of the faggot-sticks projecting from the adjacent stack of faggots also glow as if touched with fire. So vivid is the light that at the first glance it is quite startling--as if the whole collection of wood were just on the point of bursting into flame. In passing old hollow trees sometimes they appear illuminated from within: the light proceeds from the decaying `touchwood.' Old willow trees are sometimes streaked with such light from the top to the foot of the trunk. As this phosphorescence is only occasional, it would seem to depend on the condition of the atmosphere. I once noticed what looked like a glowworm on a window-blind at night, but there was no glowworm there; the light was of a pale greenish hue. In the morning an examination showed that the linen was decayed and almost rotten just in that particular spot, and it had slightly turned colour. Glowworms are uncommon in the district which has been more particularly described.