36 The Naturalist of Cumbrae. 



where he puts his feet, but he never takes into account 

 the wheels of the cart behind him." 



In these night wanderings over the moors David's 

 attention, as became an incipient student of nature, 

 was often taken upon dark nights with the luminous 

 state of the soft peaty ground. One very dark night 

 he was going with a horse and cart over a turfless 

 track of this description. The horse's legs and his 

 own and the wheels of the cart seemed to be all in a 

 glow of fire. Nothing, indeed, was to be seen, he says, 

 of the horse and cart but the legs of fire of the horse 

 walking in front and the wheels in the same state 

 following, with his own two fiery legs going side by 

 side a sight not readily to be forgotten. 



In the novel called " Clara Vaughan," R. D. Black- 

 more describes an incident of this kind as occurring 

 during the escape of Charles the Second after the 

 battle of Worcester. At nightfall in the New 

 Forest the fugitive king and his escort had lost their 

 way, when one of them, Major Cecil Vaughan, espied 

 a faint gleam familiar to him of old in the waste land 

 round his own estate. "To an accurate eye there 

 could be little doubt as to the source of the lambent 

 light flame it could not be called. It played in a 

 pale yet constant stream on a certain kind of moss, 

 known to botanists, not to me, for the waste lands 

 have been reclaimed. This light is to be seen at no 

 time except when the air is charged with electricity." 

 " That strangely sensitive moss follows the course of 

 the sun, and therefore the lambent light can only be 

 seen from the west. So all the time he could see 

 it the others never saw it at all he knew that they 



