284 LIGHT SCIENCE FOR LEISURE HOURS. 



traordinary appearance, unlike anything known within 

 the memory of man. By my journal, I find that I had 

 noticed this strange occurrence from June 23 to July 

 20, inclusive, during which period the wind varied to 

 every quarter, without making any alteration in the air. 

 The sun at noon looked as blank, and ferruginous as a 

 clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous 

 light on the ground and floors of rooms, but was par- 

 ticularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. 

 All the time the heat was so intense that butchers' meat 

 could hardly be eaten the day after it was killed ; and 

 the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges, that they 

 rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. 

 The country people began to look with a superstitious 

 awe at the red, louring aspect of the sun. Milton's 

 noble simile, in his first book of " Paradise Lost," fre- 

 quently occurred to my mind ; and it is, indeed, par- 

 ticularly applicable, because, towards the end, it alludes 

 to a superstitious kind of dread, with which the minds 

 of men are always impressed by such strange and un- 

 usual phenomena : 



As when the sun new risen, 

 Looks through the horizontal misty air, 

 Shorn of his beams ; or, from behind the moon, 

 In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds 

 On half the nations, and with fear of change 

 Perplexes monarchs.' 



Intellectual Observer, March 1867. 



