"I chanced to end my three months' visit [to the U.S.] in the same district of the Berkshires where it had begun. Now it was high summer.... At night there were fireflies to remind us that this was in the latitude of Madrid. Thunderstorms did not disconcert them, and I would watch their flash vanish in the superior brilliancy of lightning, and reappear. Some of them flew at the level of the grass, others across the curtain of birch trees. They were extraordinarily bright; it was a good year for fireflies, and the memory of them sparkling in the warm rain and the thunder is the latest of my American impressions, and the loveliest." -- E. M. Forster (1947)