184 THE LIFE OF THE FIELDS. 



is apart from my present object, which is to show that 

 sport trains the eye. As a boy, roving about the 

 hedges with my gun, it was my especial delight to see 

 Mercury, because one of the great astronomers had never 

 seen that planet, and because in all the books it was 

 stated as difficult to see. The planet was favourably 

 situated, and I used to see it constantly after sunset 

 then, pale, and but just outside the sunset glow, only 

 a little way above the distant hills. Now it is curious, 

 to remark in passing, that as the sun sets behind a hill 

 the slope of the hill towards you is often obscured by 

 his light. It appears a luminous misty surface, rosy- 

 tinted, and this luminous mist hides the trees upon 

 it, so that the slope is apparently nothing but a 

 broad sweep of colour ; while those hills opposite the 

 sun, even if twice as distant, are so clearly defined that 

 the smallest object is evident upon them. Sometimes, 

 instead of the mist on the western hill, there is a blood- 

 like purple almost startling in its glory of light 



There have been few things I have read of, or 

 studied, which in some manner or other I have not 

 seen illustrated in this country while out in the fields. 

 It is said that in the Far West, on the level prairies, 

 when the snow covers them, you see miles and miles 

 away, a waggon stopping ; you hurry on, and in half a 

 clay's journey overtake it, to find the skull of an ox 

 so greatly has distance and the mirage of the snow 

 magnified its apparent size. But a few days since I 

 saw some rooks on the telegraph wires against a bright 

 sky, but as I approached they flew and resolved into 

 starlings, so much had the brilliant light deceived me. 

 A hare sometimes, on the open ground, looks at a 



