unusual natural appearances. As I was cycling one rather dull
afternoon from Wimborne to Ringwood, I noticed a colourless rainbow,
or perhaps I should say, "mist-bow," for there was no rain, and the
sun was partially obscured. The sun was about south-west, and the bow
was north-east; it was merely a series of well-defined but colourless
segments of circles, close to each other but shaded so as to make them
distinguishable, arranged exactly like a rainbow but without a trace
of colour beyond a grey uniformity. It was on my left for several
miles, perhaps half of the total distance of nine miles between the
two towns.

Cycling another day between Lyndhurst and Burley, I reached the east
entrance of Burley Lodge, which is on higher ground than the farm
spread out to the right in the valley. The whole valley was filled
with thick white mist, as level as a lake, so that nothing could be
seen of the fields. The setting sun was low down at the further
extremity of the valley, and the surface of the mist-lake reflected
its rays in a rosy sheen, with a track of brighter light in the
middle, stretching from the far end of the lake in a broad path almost
to where I was standing; just as we see the track of sunlight or
moonlight, sometimes, on the sea, from the shore. This phenomenon is
not uncommon when one is looking down from the top of a hill in the
sunshine, upon a valley full of mist, but I have never seen it before
from comparatively low ground, as on this occasion.

My summers at Aldington were nearly always too busy to allow me to
take a holiday, except for a very few days, but when the urgent work
of the year was over, the harvest completed, and the hops and the
fruit picked, we always had a clear month away from home, about the
middle of October to the middle of November; and, as we found the