Oh, she's a wonderful fairy, Griswold."
The murderer groaned.
"Then," continued Guy Oxford, "there were the horsemen seen on Sonterfell, a hill in Scotland, in the year 1744. These figures, performing various military evolutions, were visible for over two hours, until darkness concealed them. Yet there was no man there where those troopers were moving; but a body of rebels were going through their exercises on the other side of the fell!
"There is the well-known Specter of the Brocken, too. Our fairy again, Griswold. And she visits the Lake of Killamey, also. Men moving along the shore of that romantic sheet often appear to be walking (or riding) out on the very lake itself—a phenomenon that doubtless explains the legend of O'Donoghue.
"'And spirits, from all the lake's deep bowers,
Glide o'er the blue waves scattering flowers,
Around my love and thee.'
"And we have a record of her visit in 1595 to desolate Nova Zemhla, where, ending the long arctic night, she brought the sun to some shipwrecked Dutch sailors sixteen days before that on which he should have appeared according to calculation. The sun was more than four degrees below the horizon at the time; but our fairy waved her wand, and there he was shining in the sky.
"On Sunday, December the 17th, 1826, she was in the vicinity of Poitiers, and before three thousand worshipers (and just as one of the divines was speaking of that emblem of the Christian faith seen in the heavens by Constantine and his army) a cross suddenly took form in the sky—a great cross 'of a bright silver color, tinged with red.' A miracle, said the devout, while, according to the scientist, a magnified image of a cross which had been placed near the church had been 'cast on the concave surface of some atmospheric mirror.'
"In 1822, in the polar sea, she revealed her presence to Captain Scoresby by limning in the sky an inverted image of his father's ship, the Fame, which was almost as far from his own vessel as the Queen Mab was distant from Flang. In 1839 she was with Wilkes off Cape Horn. A favorite spot of hers is the Strait of Messina, so often transformed by our fairy's magic into a catoptric theater. There, for centuries, with her spectral witchery, she amazed and awed the ignorant and set at naught the explanations of the wise.[1]
"I think, Griswold," Oxford concluded, "that you know the name of my fairy now."
The murderer nodded and groaned aloud in bitterness of soul.
"The Fay Morgana!"
"The Fay Morgana," said Guy Oxford.
"I was so careful," Griswold cried, "so sure; this was one vengeance that would never out; and then, by a cursed mirage, to be brought to this!"
"There were two images of the isle," said Guy Oxford, "the lower inverted, the upper erect. Undoubtedly they were greatly magnified, certainly they appeared to be no farther off than five or six miles. Everything was extraordinarily distinct, so that, with telescopic aid, I saw you and your victim almost as plainly as though I had been here close at hand, instead of thirty-five miles away. In all likelihood, too, the image, or images, of the Queen Mab (seen by Chantrell) were as remarkable as those of the island itself."
"And I thought," exclaimed Griswold bitterly, "that Flang would keep the secret well, the secret that in reality never was a secret at all,
- ↑ "The complexity of these phenomena [looming and mirage] is enormous, nor, except in the most general terms, have they been adequately explained.—Hastings.
