the desert, really I suspect the thing is hopeless: but, as regards our
planetary orbit, matters are mending: for the last six or seven years I
have heard of these fiery showers, but indeed I cannot say how much
earlier they were first noticed,[Footnote: Somewhere I have seen it
remarked, that if, on a public road, you meet a party of four women, it
is at least fifty to one that they are all laughing; whereas, if you
meet an equal party of my own unhappy sex, you may wager safely that
they are talking gravely, and that one of them is uttering the word
_money_. Hence it must be, viz, because our sisters are too much
occupied with the playful things of this earth, and our brothers with
its gravities, that neither party sufficiently watches the skies. And
_that_ accounts for a fact which often has struck myself, viz.,
that, in cities, on bright moonless nights, when some brilliant
skirmishings of the Aurora are exhibiting, or even a luminous arch,
which is a broad ribbon of snowy light that spans the skies, positively
unless I myself say to people--'Eyes upwards!' not one in a hundred,
male or female, but fails to see the show, though it may be seen
_gratis_, simply because their eyes are too uniformly reading the
earth. This downward direction of the eyes, however, must have been
worse in former ages: because else it never _could_ have happened
that, until Queen Anne's days, nobody ever hinted in a book that there
_was_ such a thing, or _could_ be such a thing, as the Aurora
Borealis; and in fact Halley had the credit of discovering it.] as
celebrating two annual festivals--one in August, one in November. You
are a little too late, reader, for seeing this year's summer festival;
but that's no reason why you should not engage a good seat for the
November meeting; which, if I recollect, is about the 9th, or the Lord
Mayor's day, and on the whole better worth seeing. For anything
_we_ know, this may be a great day in the earth's earlier history;
she may have put forth her original rose on this day, or tried her hand