‘Have you seen the mysterious sky-visitor? On Friday evening our maids saw something like three stars, one red,—but they disappeared. On the following night Cousins[12] called me to look on what I would not have missed seeing for a good deal. About thirty degrees above the horizon, I should think, shone what was like a star, but more splendid than any that I had ever beheld, of a brilliant magenta colour. It was no falling star passing rapidly through the sky, but appeared quite fixed in the heavens for—perhaps ten minutes. As I gazed with something like awe on its wondrous beauty, suddenly its colour utterly changed; the magenta became white, with a greenish tinge; and then—as suddenly—the star disappeared; not as if hidden by a cloud, but as if put out.
‘I watched for the mysterious light last night, but could not see it; the evening had been so strangely dark that we had lighted candles an hour before sunset, though our window looks to the west. No star was visible to me; but our maids had a short glimpse of a strange light. I am sitting by the window now to watch for the visitor in the north-west.... I searched The Times to-day to see if there were any mention of it, but could find none.’
Evidently Charlotte Tucker had been fortunate enough to see a very fine meteor; though probably the supposed duration of ten minutes was in reality a good deal shorter. The idea of watching for the same meteor next night is somewhat amusing. The maids doubtless saw what they expected to see; but Charlotte Tucker, though non-scientific, was far too practical so to indulge her powers of imagination.
In another letter written during this same July to Mrs. Hamilton occurs one little sentence well worth quoting, for it is a sentence which might serve as a motto for many a seemingly empty and even purposeless life—
‘It is sweet to be somebody’s sunshine.’
In June Mrs. Tucker had written to a friend,—‘Charlotte walked twice to church, and thinks she is stronger.’ And in a letter to Mrs. Hamilton, on the 23rd of July, Charlotte said of herself,—‘I am quite well now, and up to work’;—yet the following to a niece, on September 1st, does not speak of fully restored energies:—
‘I have so much to be grateful for, I wish that I were of a more thankful spirit. It seems as if this year had aged me. When I saw a bright creature like ——, I mentally contrasted her with myself, and thought,—“She has not the gee out of her. Cheerfully and hopefully she enters on her untried sphere of work. In her place I should be taking cares!”—very wrong of me. I often take myself to task.
‘I feel putting off my dark dress for one day on Wednesday.... My darling was to me what she was not to her other Aunts.’
To some people, or in certain states of body and mind, the afternoon is apt to be a more tired time than the evening. At this stage in Charlotte Tucker’s Afternoon of life she passed through a somewhat weary spell, though never really ill; but her energies were to revive for the work of her Eventide.
On October 6th she could say,—