3 8 JANUARY 



the ships completely. A yet stranger illusion has been 

 acted before sailors in the China Sea. They saw a low 

 island sink slowly before their eyes, and as slowly 

 emerge cleared of house and inhabitant. It was not till 

 the ship rocked unbelievably that they realised the pres 

 ence of an immense tidal surge. To call it a tidal wave is 

 to belittle the phenomenon unduly. 



The English mist of the opening year was followed by 

 a hoar-frost, both unusual in structure and unusually 

 lovely. Every edge was silvered ; and the crystals along 

 the twigs were all built up along the southern edge, not 

 on the top. This was so general that if you looked north 

 wards along a trim hedge, its wall was white ; if you 

 looked southwards it was dark with only broken points 

 of white. Every evergreen leaf, of holly in the hedge, as 

 of laurel in the garden, had what florists call a picotee 

 edge. In some of the hollies, where the spikes came for 

 ward to meet each other, the frost had bridged the short 

 gap, as if a spider s web had been stretched across and 

 crystallised. What remnants there were of real spiders 

 webs or gossamers and they were more frequent than 

 you had suspected were all completely coated with rime. 

 They suggested necklaces of seed pearls of impossible 

 minuteness. . Some of the fringes were made up of 

 crystal piled upon crystal ; and you could easily imagine 

 the glory of the inner pattern that has so enthralled some 

 of the scientists that they have spent half a lifetime in 

 collecting and photographing patterns. These are almost 

 infinite, though nearly all are founded on the form of a 

 six-rayed star. Some suggest a Tudor rose, some a star 

 fish, some a collar-stud ; and as you looked at these 

 hoar-frost crystals singly and closely they looked each 

 like a mimic pagoda. 



The pearls of the mist, out of which these crystals are 



