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One afternoon, when his day's work was over, Fettes dropped into a popular tavern and found Macfarlane sitting with a stranger. This was a small man, very pale and dark, with coal-black eyes. The cut of his features gave a promise of intellect and refinement which was but feebly realised in his manners, for he proved, upon a nearer acquaintance, coarse, vulgar, and stupid.
Even this coal-black tribute to ceremony has discredited me with some, who argue that I am not a plain man because I do not prefer to dine in the same old pepper-and-salt.
Grey and brown granite cliffs and ridges rose on both sides of the path, and in the sand which covered it lay heaps of small bits of red porphyry and coal-black stones that seemed as if they had been broken by the blows of a hammer and resembled the dross from which metal had been melted.
The first Sunday, the first time she went to the library for family prayers, Peggy was sitting on the little green sofa, and as Esther passed across the room to her place she saw her cast a glance of admiration on William's tall figure, and the memory of that glance had flamed up in her brain, and all that night Esther saw the girl with the pale face and the coal-black hair looking at her William.
At this moment there came suddenly along up the Via Sacra a tall man, deeply enveloped in a mantle, who drew near the fountain without looking round, threw down his hat, and held a coal-black, curly, almost perpendicular, hindhead under the stream of water.
And as says another: Thine eyes have never looked upon a fairer sight, Of all the things that are to see beneath the sky, Than yonder mole of brown, that nestles on his face, Midmost the rosy cheek, beneath the coal-black eye. The many gall-bladders that burst for him it is that make The shining fringes of his cheek so black and bright to see.
Wowkle thought a moment; then suddenly edging up close to him she promised to come to him after the Girl had had her supper. "Huh!" fairly roared the Indian, his coal-black eyes glowing as he looked at her. It was at this juncture that the Girl, after hanging up her lantern on a peg on the outer door, broke in unexpectedly upon the strange pair of lovers.
Such was the breed of Ned Low, of Gow the Scotchman, and of the infamous Sharkey, whose coal-black barque, the Happy Delivery, was known from the Newfoundland Banks to the mouths of the Orinoco as the dark forerunner of misery and of death.
And without troubling about anything or uttering a sound, he sped on his strong coal-black wings through the dense rain-mist, steering due west. But as he flew, evenly and meditatively, his sharp eyes searched the landscape beneath, and the old bird was full of chagrin.
No diplomat could have done it better; and as I walled away from him I knew that he regarded me as an outsider, a Northerner, belonging to a race hostile to his people; he had seen Mas' John friendly with me, but that was Mas' John's affair. And so it was that if the ladies had kept something from me, this cunning, old, polite, coal-black African had kept everything from me.
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