160 
CAPE COD. 
to his still greater astonishment, saw the sun just where 
it was before, two thirds above the horizon. He showed 
me where its rajs fell on the wall across the room. He 
proceeded to make a fire, and when he had done, there 
was the sun still at the same height. Whereupon, 4iot 
trusting to his own eyes any longer, he called up his 
wife to look at it, and she saw it also. There were ves¬ 
sels in sight on the ocean, and their crews, too, he said, 
must have seen it, for its rays fell on them. It remained 
at that height for about fifteen minutes by the clock, and 
then rose as usual, and nothing else extraordinary hap¬ 
pened during that day. Though accustomed to the 
coast, he had never witnessed nor heard of such a phe¬ 
nomenon before. I suggested that there might have 
been a cloud in the horizon invisible to him, whicli rose 
, with the sun, and his clock was only as accurate as the 
average; or perhaps, as he denied- the possibility of 
this, it was such a looming of the sun as is said to occur 
at Lake Superior and elsewhere. Sir John Franklin, 
for instance, says in his Narrative, that when he was on 
the shore of the Polar Sea, the horizontal refraction 
varied so much one morning that “the upper limb of 
the sun twice appeared at the horizon before it finally 
rose.” 
He certainly must be a sun of Aurora to whom the 
sun looms, when there are so many millions to whom 
it glooms rather, or who never see it till an hour after 
it has risen. But it behooves us old stagers to keep our 
lamps trimmed and burning to the last, and not trust to 
the sun’s looming. 
This keeper remarked that the centre of the flame 
should be exactly opposite the centre of the reflectors, 
and that accordingly, if he was not careful to turn down 
