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But, for the moment, everything was plain: the sky, full of light, and filmy grey cloud, the fells with their mingling of wood and purple crag, the shallow reach of the river beyond the garden, with a little family of wild duck floating upon it, and just below her a vivid splash of colour, a mass of rhododendron in bloom, setting its rose-pink challenge against the cool greys and greens of the fell.
"Did you ever know people lost on these hills?" asked the girl, looking into the blackness ahead of them. Her shrill, slight voice rang out in sharp contrast to the broad gutturals of his Westmoreland speech. "Aye, missy I've known two men lost on t' fells sin I wor a lad." "Were they shepherds, like you?" "Noa, missy they wor tramps.
A bright moon hung in the frosty sky. The fells rose from the opposite edge of the lake like phantom mountains. The air was stirless. Through the boughs and sprays of the leafless elms no sigh or motion, however hushed, was audible. Not a ripple glimmered on the lake, which at one point only reflected the brilliant moon from its dark blue expanse like burnished steel.
"We have made everything in readiness to drive off our cattle to the fells; the beacons are all prepared for lighting, from Berwick down to Carlisle; and assuredly the Scotch will find little, near the border, to carry back with them. "You are the son of stout John Forster of Yardhope Keep, are you not? I saw you riding by his side, two months since, at Alwinton fair."
As one labours in London and sinks into a dream, remembering the hills wherein he spends a lonely summer, among Westmorland's fells and by the becks, so the Boer, called cityward, looks back upon the wide and lonely veldt which is never too wide and never lonelier to him than to any of the beasts he loves to hunt. But the fauna disappear, and ancient civilisations crumble.
"Catch hold of the trees, Bobby!" she shouted to him, in an agony. The child heard, turned a white face to her, and tried to obey. He was already a stalwart little mountaineer, accustomed to trot over the fells after his father's sheep, and the physical instinct in his, sturdy limbs saved him.
All the way till we reached the cloud-belt, we had the larks pouring down their music from the sky above us. They seemed specially jubilant. It was May in England, too, and they sang as though the spirit of those downs and fells was stirring in their hearts, under alien skies, but true to the memories of home.
Above the eastern fells scarlet feather-clouds were hovering; the sun rushed upon them as she looked; and in that blue dimness to the north lay Bannisdale. She sprang up, stared half aghast at the black depths of the quarry, beside which she had been sleeping, then searched the fell with her eyes. Yes, there was the upward path.
Why, I never saw such a " "It is the yule log, miss. Ay, and you might go all round England, and not find its fellow, I trow. But our Squire he don't go to the chandler's shop for his yule log, but to his own woods, and fells a great tree." A housemaid now came forward with bed candles, to show Miss Carden to her room.
A few breathless seconds and Stukely had crept close up behind his intended victim; and the next instant, as he knocked the man's hat off with one hand, he dealt him with the other a blow on the head with the heavy butt of his pistol, which felled the unfortunate fellow as a butcher fells an ox.
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