est month for observing them. During July and August glow-worms
seem to migrate to warmer quarters in sheltered banks and holes, nor is
their light visible to the eye after June is out, save on very warm
evenings, and then only in a lesser degree.

The glow-worms on this particular night were so numerous as to remind
one of the fireflies in the tropics. At no place are these lovely
insects more numerous and resplendent than at Kandy in Ceylon. Myriads
of them flit about in the cool evening atmosphere, giving the appearance
of countless meteors darting in different directions across the sky.

In the clear Cotswold atmosphere very brilliant meteors are observable
at certain seasons of the year. Never shall I forget the strange variety
of phenomena witnessed whilst driving homewards one evening in autumn
from the railway station seven miles away. There had been a time of
stormy, unsettled weather for some weeks previously, and the
meteorological conditions were in a very disturbed state. But as I
started homewards the stars were shining brightly, whilst far away in
the western sky, beyond the rolling downs and bleak plains of the
Cotswold Hills, shone forth the strange, mysterious, zodiacal light,
towering upwards into a point among the stars, and shaped in the form of
a cone. It was the first occasion this curious, unexplained phenomenon
had ever come under my notice, and it was awe inspiring enough in
itself. But before I had gone more than two miles of my solitary
journey, great black clouds came up behind me from the south, and I knew
I was racing with the storm. Then, as "the great organ of eternity
began to play" and the ominous murmurs of distant thunder broke the
silence of the night, a stiff breeze from the south seemed to come from
behind and pass me, as if travelling quicker than my fast-trotting nag.
Like a whisper from the grave it rustled in the brown, lifeless leaves
that still lingered on the trees, making me wish I was nearer the old
house that I knew was ready to welcome me five miles on in the little
valley, nestling under the sheltering hill. And soon more clouds seemed
to spring up suddenly, north, south, east, and west, where ten minutes
before the sky had been clear and starry. And the sheet lightning began
to play over them with a continuous flow of silvery radiance, north
answering south, and east giving back to west the reflected glory of the
mighty electric fluid. But the centre of the heavens wa