Fireflies in Cornwall
As I hurried down the muddy road I saw fireflies ahead of me splashing the new darkness. And then suddenly the scene widened. On my left a broad meadow rolled away up the mountain; on my right lay a broader region of marshy ground sacred to flags and frogs. I knew that over all that green meadow buttercups were contending with daisies which should make it white or yellow, but now it was black with the night though somehow brightened by the gleaming mist. In the swamp, too, I knew there would soon be irises blooming, though now it had nothing but the paler iridescence of the quiet drizzle. And yet the night was alive with an uncanny and unaccustomed splendour. The fireflies were holding some sort of carnival, it seemed, moving up and down the meadow slope in glimmering processions and swarming thickly over the marsh which they almost illuminated with their fitful and inclusive flashes. There must have been thousands of them, for the usual intervals of darkness never came, and every instant was spangled. But the marvel of the occasion was not the number of lights but the magnitude of them. By some trick of the mist, some reflection from the particles of water suspended in the air, every firefly shone not as a vivid speck but as a slow, large, bland splotch of mellow light. Over the swamp they were so crowded and cast so many reflections upon the water and wet earth and dripping flags that they had created the perfect semblance of a lake on which numberless canoes rode softly with dancing lanterns. Up the mountain meadow they seemed, and doubtless were, less numerous, but the wonder continued, for they glowed here and there on the rising hillside like searchers beating through the grass for something lost. And, most exquisite of all, now and then on the high ridge of the hill behind the meadow a lantern would flash and move down into the carnival or up out of it. This hollow of the hills was a cup of light, filled to the brim, which continually spilled over only to be replenished by these bright creatures of the dark.