toga, and night came fully ere we
struck the bottom of the grade. I have never seen such a night. It
seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever
dabbled in starlight. The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless,
changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent's back. The stars by
innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was
bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater
luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter's moon. Their light was
dyed in every sort of colour--red, like fire; blue, like steel; green,
like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its
own lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch
we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos
of contesting luminaries--a hurly-burly of stars. Against this the hills
and rugged treetops stood out redly dark.

As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first grew
pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven dwindled in
number by successive millions; those that still shone had tempered their
exceeding brightness and fallen back into their customary wistful
distance; and the sky declined from its first bewildering splendour into
the appearance of a common night. Slowly this change proceeded, and
still there was no sign of any cause. Then a whiteness like mist was
thrown over the spurs of the mountain. Yet awhile, and, as we turned a
corner, a great leap of silver light and net of forest shadows fell
across the road and upon our wondering waggonful and, swimming low among
the trees, we beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half tilted on
her back.

"Where are ye when the moon appears?" so the old poet sang, half
taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose.

"As the sunlight round the dim earth's midnight tower of
shadow pours,
Streaming past the dim, wide portals,
Viewless to the eyes of mortals,
Till it floods the moon's pale islet or the morning's
golden shores."

So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration. And so had the
sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lit face put out,
one after another, that galaxy of stars. The wonder of the drive was
over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the air and fit
shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen for a little while
that brave display of t