JUNE 331 



summers is that the twilights are so short. I missed 

 much the long, pale primrose evening skies of June, which 

 at home throw up their faint Northern brightness right 

 into the indigo of the star skies of night and almost meet 

 Aurora at her waking. 



But the dark evenings are wanted to show the beauty 

 of those wonderful fairy-like things that flit about in 

 millions under the Olive-trees and in the corn. I had 

 never seen the fireflies since the summer I passed under 

 Fiesole when I was a little child of ten, but I had not 

 forgotten them. The poetry that hangs around them is 

 endless ; their natural history is prosaic. They are 

 beetles. Both sexes are luminous, though that is not the 

 general belief in Italy. They are nearly related to our 

 glowworm. The colour of the fireflies is warmer and 

 more golden than the blue light of the glowworm, and 

 their beauty is enhanced and made more mysterious 

 because the light comes and goes, and shows much more 

 brightly at intervals. These fireflies are usually only to 

 be met with in quite the South of Europe, but in fine 

 hot summers they can be seen in rarer numbers as 

 far north as Switzerland and even the middle of 

 Germany. The Italians call them lucciole, and associate 

 them with all sorts of pretty poetical stories. Ouida says : 

 ' One cannot wonder that the poets love them, and that 

 the children believe them to be fairies carrying their little 

 lanterns on their road to dance in the magic circle under 

 the leaves in the wood. Some say they die in a day ; 

 some say they live on for ages. Who shall tell ? They 

 look always the same.' 



On one side of my house was a much-neglected but 

 lovely little square, walled garden with beautiful tall iron 

 gates. The beds and paths, edged with stone, were of a 

 simple formal pattern, which gave great dignity to the 

 weedy little wilderness ; and there were the usual large 



