The fact is, the young fellow is a good-hearted creature enough, only too fond of his jokes,and if it were not for those heat-lightning winks on one side of his face, I should not mind his fun much.]

Years afterward, Rudolph recalled her words, plainer than the fiery wonder that spread and burst round their little vessel, or the long play of heat-lightning which now, from time to time, wavered instantly along the eastern sea-line.

So long as the boiling witch-fire turned their wake to golden vapor, he could not be sure; but whenever the heat-lightning ran, and through the sere, phantasmal sail, the lookout in the bow flashed like a sharp silhouette through wire gauze,then it seemed to Rudolph that another small black shape leapt out astern, and vanished.

Next we knew he was down like heat-lightning.

It makes you feel like heat-lightning just to watch 'em fly!

There, reclining in the attitude of Hamlet at the feet of Ophelia, he rambled on from subject to subject, in a careless, graceful way, plucking up grass and picking daisies to pieces, as he talked, giving every now and then, from beneath the languid sweep of his heavy eyelashes, quick flashes of tender meaning, as fitful and beautiful as the "heat-lightnings" of summer twilights, and apparently as harmless.

The usual forms of lightning are the zigzag or forked sharply defined,the sheet-lightning, illuminating a whole cloud, which it seems to open,heat-lightning, not emanating from any cloud, but apparently diffused through the air and without report.

The flashing that occasionally illuminated the summit of Vesuvius resembled heat-lightning, and would have plainly indicated the position of that celebrated mountain, had not its dark outlines been visible, exposing a black mass at the head of the Bay.

So much in wit and humor depends on the electric flash, the relation of the idea to the attendant circumstances, that people often remember only how they have laughed, and can no more reproduce the expression than they can daguerreotype the heat-lightning of a July night.

Tired of stirring up dry, dead leaves, I leaned against a tree,one arm was around it,and with my eyes traversing the blue of the sky, on and on, in quick, constant, flashing journeys, like fixed heat-lightning, I suddenly became conscious of a blue upon the earth, orbed in my mother's cool eyes.