After an interminable string of games, we supped, and the
artilleryman finished the champagne.  We went on smoking the cigars.
He was no longer the energetic regenerator of his species I had
encountered in the morning.  He was still optimistic, but it was a
less kinetic, a more thoughtful optimism.  I remember he wound up with
my health, proposed in a speech of small variety and considerable
intermittence.  I took a cigar, and went upstairs to look at the
lights of which he had spoken that blazed so greenly along the
Highgate hills.

At first I stared unintelligently across the London valley.  The
northern hills were shrouded in darkness; the fires near Kensington
glowed redly, and now and then an orange-red tongue of flame flashed
up and vanished in the deep blue night.  All the rest of London
was black.  Then, nearer, I perceived a strange light, a pale,
violet-purple fluorescent glow, quivering under the night breeze.  For
a space I could not understand it, and then I knew that it must be
the red weed from which this faint irradiation proceeded.  With that
realisation my dormant sense of wonder, my sense of the proportion of
things, awoke again.  I glanced from that to Mars, red and clear,
glowing high in the west, and then gazed long and earnestly at the
darkness of Hampstead and Highgate.