Flaring

This consists in a waving motion backward and forward, sometimes like a fan, sometimes like a long scroll flying in the wind, over which flaring waves chase each other with such velocity that the eye refuses to follow their trembling flight. It is, no doubt, this characteristic of sudden and seemingly capricious motion which has given rise in the imagination to the dragons, demons and giants, to the elvish " merry dancers " of the Shetlanders, to the Valkyries of the Norsemen, and to the ghostly gambols of the departed spirits of the Eskimos, to all the wealth of myth and folk-lore which touched the hearts and quickened the imaginations of the long forgotten forefathers of these northern tribes.

“Little of this faulty book of mine was composed in the closet,” he explains; “it was gathered by my own eyes and ears, concocted in my own slender intellect while at my rural employment, and wrote down on scraps of paper as I found it convenient in the midst of the works of nature, in the open air, beneath the flaring sun, in a quarryhole perhaps. Sometimes again on a ‘braeside,’ and ablins whiles in a ‘thick wud,’ or on the back of a ‘grey stane,’ the whole, therefore, has the smell, as it were, of Nature; her rudeness is about it, and when her plaid keeps the shoulders of anything warm, that thing looks contented indeed.”

Mazie and Nick have trouble, in the first place, making the fire. They finally start a great flaring fire instead of the small steady flame that Prudence requires for cooking.

[…] those shootings of stars, eclipses of the moon, howlings of dogs, and flarings of candles, carefully noted and interpreted by the oracular sibyls […]

Now the moon illumined them with bluish gleams, and anon the fires of aurora borealis seemed to cover them with the flarings of a great conflagration.

The rigid features of the deceased ecclesiastic, and his recumbent foi-m, dressed out in all the pomp of ecclesiastical vestments, the chanting priests, the flaring of countless torches, and the long train of black-hooded brethren that filed along through the midst of the bustling throng, formed, altogether, a picture of a very impressive character.

Separate research suggests a switch from the flaring of methane to venting may be behind some of these vast outpourings. Flaring is used to burn unwanted gas, putting CO₂ into the atmosphere, but is easy to detect and has been increasingly frowned upon in recent years.