THE remarkable illuminations of our twilights this winter are not exclusively Californian possessions: strange and unaccountable as it naturally appears to us that any particularly desirable atmospheric effect should not be peculiarly our own, we still must yield to the testimony of an unbiased press, and believe that the same violet and golden and crimson blaze is wheeling impartially round and round the globe in the track of the sunset, drawing out sonnets in English magazines and scientific theories in Australian lecturerooms. But the continuous clearness of our winter skies on this coast-especially in this unusually rainless winter-have probably made this the most favorable theater of the splendid nightly display. Let no one fear that the following pages are to contain any speculation as to the cause of the afterglows: their purpose is merely to preserve, before they fade from memory, a few casual and unscientific observations of their phenomena, in default of the account from some painter, and the account from some scientific observer, that ought to be forthcoming.

The weeks since the beginning of the afterglows have contained, in the vicinity of the bay, a few intervals of rainy, or rather, drizzly, weather; but, as a whole, they have been phenomenally clear-not merely free from clouds and fog, but of a brilliantly transarent atmosphere. This is not so strictly rue of the bay itself and the cities on its ery margin, where local fogs have often ested, as of the outlying neighborhoods: ll, there have been many more evenings n which the ferry-boats afforded an unequald outlook upon an almost inconceivable ilmination of sky and water and shore, than renings upon which they did not. The bay is, indeed, been throughout the right place see the afterglows. It is hard upon the 0:10mic interests of the State that such a eat quantity of shipping should be lying e in the harbor, but it is a very good thing

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for the scenic interests; and one wonders not to see at the right hour, just after sunset, all the painters in California gathered around. the margins of the Oakland estuary or the shores of Goat Island, or taking rapid notes from the sterns of the ferry-boats, or more leisurely ones from becalmed skiffs, of the slender masts and curved hulls in perfect silhouette against an orange sky, each doubled by a perfect reflection in orange water. course, the vessels out in the open bay do not thus double themselves; I never saw the water smooth enough for that. But in the "creek" every spar and rope nightly stands inverted, traced on a polished surface of orange or salmon or violet. "It must be like Turner," one says, who has not seen it, as he imagines the red light pouring out of the west, keeping the sky as bright as day for long after the sun has gone down, flooding the eastern hills, the plain with its towns and trees, the groves of masts on the bay, and painting dark reflections on brilliant water in the smooth estuary with its throng of shipping. But, in fact, it is not very much like Turner. There is not, after all, much color in these illuminations, so far as I have noticed. They are red and they are yellow, and orange, and violet, but each one consists of a good deal of light to a very little of the characteristic color; as if one dropped a very small grain of coloring matter into a very large glass of water. It has been noticeable that the redness of the west was never adequate to the illumination that seemed to be coming from it; often the color that was in the light only revealed itself by bringing out more distinctly answering shades in the landscape. This was especially true of the December afterglows. There has been in January more color and less light, so that often the effect has been only a colored sky, and one standing with his back to the west would see very little-a reflected color in the eastern sky, probably, but no more. In early December,

on the contrary, one who glanced to the east would turn at once, startled at the red glow that bathed everything, and would see not enough color in the west to seem to account for it.

This lighting up of the landscape with a red tinge was the first unusual phenomenon that was noticed when the afterglows began, and for some time continued the most prominent one. People began to talk at once of the "red sunsets"; but, in fact, we have never been having more neutral sunsets. The glow is entirely after sunset. I have repeatedly timed its first appearance, and have never found it earlier than fifteen minutes after the sun had disappeared. The proceedings in early December, every time that I watched them through, were something as follows:

The sun would go down in a cold, neutral sky; the whole landscape cold and neutral, looking, indeed, a little as if it might snow before morning if the temperature would fall sufficiently. The colorlessness of twilight would settle down on the eastern hills, and, for fifteen or twenty minutes, only a yellowish pallor in the west would indicate that the sun had gone down there. Then, if you were looking toward the east, a subtle brightening and deepening of the greens in the landscape caught your eye; the grass and the trees became, by imperceptible degrees, luminous--and yet deep in shade, not at all gold-green; the green tinge, creeping over the brown hills, hardly noticeable by day, came out strongly; green blinds on houses stepped forward and accosted the eye. The coldness and neutrality were gone from sky and earth, yet so impalpably that you could not say anything else had taken their place. But in about five minutes this something else began to assert itself: a brightness began to pour over the world like the low afternoon light, that pours out from under a fog-bank when the sun is about to appear and traverse a narrow rim of clear sky before setting; it grew lighter-you would think the sun had not set; the grass and trees became a little golden. If you were not on the lookout, your eye would now first be caught; at this

point every one catching a glimpse of east, or even south or north, would hurry to look at the west. I passed by the open door of a room whose window looked west, once, just at this stage, and stepped to the door to see why a lamp had been lighted inside, so bright was the slightly yellow light that filled the room-all from the western window, twenty-five minutes after the sun had set in a matter-of-fact way in a cold sky. Yet there was never very much to see in the west while all this marvelous brightness was pouring out of it-a yellow glow, nothing more. Later, a red tinge crept into the light, a redness into the western sky. This was the finest and the most noticeable part of the whole. The sky was hardly redder than that above a great fire, when seen too far away for the flames to be visible. Nor did the landscape appear in any sense bathed in redness; one did not feel the air red about him, as in the red lights of tableaus. It was merely that every white or light-colored object became rosy, every red or brown or purple one glowed-the red in its color answering back to the quality in the air that called it out.

At this culminating point of the spectacle, the bay was the best place to be: it occurred for many nights about as the five o'clock boat approached the ferry-landing. Until it became an old story, people stood on deck. turning curious faces-each face suffused with a rosy glow-toward the west; feathers and ribbons responded in many varied ways to the action of the light upon their ow colors. Off from the boat in every direction spread a world, natural, and yet transformed lightly touched with a pervading illumina tion, not smothered or drowned in colo There was nothing in the least uncann about it, as one might suppose there woul be in red skies and red lights; nothing make the most superstitious question wh might be the portent. Nor was there a monotony of crimson or rose overflowi other colors; as I have said, so light an fusion of color seemed to be dissolved the glow that you perceived it only in t warm ruddiness taken on by all colors t contained red-the brown showing throu

green on hills and islands, the masts of vessels, the piers and in the flush cast upon everything white or nearly so; all other colors were only indefinably and beautifully affect ed by the subtle response of something in them to the coloring in the air, or else, not so responding, sank out of sight in the twilight. For the most part, however, there seemed to be no twilight; although print could hardly be read, the appearance of light in the air, the distinctness of colors, the clearness with which every spar of the shipping stood out, seemed fike day-light; and yet there were no shadows, no distinction of light and shade; it seemed a suggestion of what the light might be that was not of moon nor sun. The electric lights and the colored lights on the piers and the ship-lights on the water were kindled; they did not seem to discord in the least with the light in the air-as gaslight does with starlight or daylight or ordinary sunset light; they seemed, as you looked across the softly stirring level of water to them, like concentrated points of the diffused color, as a few diamond or ruby points look among opals, or even more like the point of color in the opal itself. So, too, when for several evenings the moon was up at this same hour, there was no cross-light, but a mellow blending, strange enough, but very lovely.

So selective was the light that all objects whose color did not answer to it rapidly grew indistinguishable darkness while others were still vivid. By the time the ferry crossing vas over and the trains moving through Oakand, twilight began to prevail; as you passed he still waters of the "creek" you could ee how late it really was by the solid darkess that filled up the outlines of ships against le red sky or salmon water, or by the oblit ration of outlines and all when land, instead fsky or water, came into their background. he marsh-land lay an indistinguishable darkess, defined all around and through by chanis and pools of salmon-pink; and on the 100th surface of the estuary the many ships ere lying at anchor-forty, sometimes, beeen Broadway and the head of the channel, o-thirds of them three-masted-lay etched

on the same color in faultless duplicate. Even when the marsh-land had grown so black that fences and houses were themselves invisible upon it, their reflections, falling across some one of the pools-which still held their salmon tint—were bright and perfect. It was one of the unusual characteristics in these afterglows that, instead of being a rapid flush and then gone, they lingered long and faded slowly. For an hour or two still a redness darkened and narrowed in the west, and smooth water or even white or red walls faintly-barely perceptibly-returned it.

In this respect as in several others, the recent afterglows have been different. They vary from evening to evening, but when the sky is clear-and clear evenings have been the rule-those that I have noted have been in the main much alike. They have kept the character of afterglows in being considerably later than sunset; but there has not been nearly so much illumination of the landscape as in the earlier ones: what with this and with the change there has been to a cooler range of colors-violet and lemon and rose more than crimson and gold—and with the whole phenomenon's becoming an old story, most people are probably scarcely aware that the afterglows have continued almost steadily up to the time of this writing.

The first appearance, almost every evening, has been a sudden flush of rosy violet, spreading up like a vapor over the whole western sky; it is like nothing so much as violet fumes curling up from a chemist's beaker, only diffused to an infinite delicacy. Sometimes it comes up half-way to the zenith, sometimes less; sometimes is reflected in the east, and sometimes overspreads the whole sky. It casts a slight violet tinge over reflecting water, and is attended with a slight —but only a slight-lighting up of the whole air. The evening star, shining through the light film of color, is peculiarly beautiful. Almost before one can turn to look at the west, the violet is yellowing on its under margin, and the yellow spreading upward from the rim of the western mountains. Sometimes at first sight this is lemon-yellow, distinctly inclining to green; oftener a pale