eub | Chet Raymo, Honey from Stone

147 -- A report in the Times of London in 1907 described soaring lights that had been see on a number of evenings in Norfolk. A local gamekeeper declared that he had shot one of the moving lights and found it to be an aged and half-starved barn owl. A Shropshire correspondent to the Times added that he had known a pair of barn owls with with "gift of luminosity" (Praeger's words), but only when the birds were in poor condition.

167 -- In the bardic schools of ancient Ireland, the young poets-in-training, having been set in the evening a theme for composition, retired each one to his private cell, a cell furnished with nothing more than a bed and perhaps a peg on which to hang a cloak, and -- most importantly -- without windows, there to compose the requisite rhymes, taking care to observe the designated rules as to syllables, quartans, concord, correspondence, termination, and union, in total darkness, throughout the remainder of the night and all the next day, undistracted by the least ray of the sun, until the following evening at an appointed time when a light was brought in and the poem written down. An eighteenth-century account of the bardic schools by the Marquis of Claricarde [sic?] asserts that the discipline of darkness was imposed so that the young poets might avoid the "Distractions which Light and the variety of Objects represented thereby commonly occasions," and in darkness "more fully focus the Faculties of the Soul" upon the subject at hand.