"Not at all," cried a
glow-worm, "if she were to wake without seeing a night-light she might be frightened, so I shall be her night-light."
The
glow-worm fight was waning too, but it was still there.
Downy-Back said, "Yes," and Thistle, thanking the kindly flowers, followed his little guide, through long, dark galleries, deeper and deeper into the ground; while a
glow-worm flew before to light the way.
Towards midnight, however, it disappeared, or, to use a more appropriate term, it "died out" like a large
glow-worm. Had it fled?
The spark - a feeble spark, first principle of conflagration - shone in the darkness like a
glow-worm, then was deadened against the match which it set fire to, Porthos enlivening the flame with his breath.
By the time that I got out into the grounds Sherlock Holmes was on the roof, and I could see him like an enormous
glow-worm crawling very slowly along the ridge.
There was no other to preserve my name from being blackened and aspersed among this nest of boon companions, and through them, perhaps, into the world; and beside my abandoned wretch of a husband, the base, malignant Grimsby, and the false villain Hargrave, this boorish ruffian, coarse and brutal as he was, shone like a
glow-worm in the dark, among its fellow worms.
It is the
glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset."
We conjured up the picture of ourselves inside, tired and a little hungry; of the gloomy river and the shapeless trees; and, like a giant
glow-worm underneath them, our dear old boat, so snug and warm and cheerful.
"Yes," I said; "and here is a handful of
glow-worms for the footlights."
She was a big one, and she was coming in a hurry, too, looking like a black cloud with rows of
glow-worms around it; but all of a sudden she bulged out, big and scary, with a long row of wide-open furnace doors shining like red-hot teeth, and her monstrous bows and guards hanging right over us.
A kind of ambitious glory which had lighted his face was extinguished, like the light of
glow-worms we crush beneath the grass.