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The sun was setting; the crags were gold-tipped; the shadows crept upward; the sky seemed to darken swiftly; then the gold changed to red, slowly dulled, and the grays and purples stood out. Shefford was entranced with the beautiful changing effects, and watched till the walls turned black and the sky grew steely and a faint star peeped out. Then he set about the necessary camp tasks.

And then the life and motion of the sky, the southwesterly winds, the black and lowering clouds suddenly followed by a wild and dazzling gleam of sunlight, the grays and purples flying on and leaving behind them a welcome expanse of shining April blue.

Her dress a study in purples had been a marvel, but was now old, and even tattered; the ruffles at her wrist were tumbled; and the pencilling under her still fine eyes had been neglected. George, between his wife's dumb anger and his mother's folly, had passed through disagreeable times already since Lady Tressady's arrival, and was now once more endeavouring to get to the bottom of her affairs.

They were sombre blues, opaque like a delicately carved bowl in lapis lazuli, and yet with a quivering lustre that suggested the palpitation of mysterious life; there were purples, horrible like raw and putrid flesh, and yet with a glowing, sensual passion that called up vague memories of the Roman Empire of Heliogabalus; there were reds, shrill like the berries of holly one thought of Christmas in England, and the snow, the good cheer, and the pleasure of children and yet by some magic softened till they had the swooning tenderness of a dove's breast; there were deep yellows that died with an unnatural passion into a green as fragrant as the spring and as pure as the sparkling water of a mountain brook.

It was at Bakersville that we saw specimens of mica that resembled the delicate tracery in the moss-agate and had the iridescent sheen of the rainbow colors the most delicate greens, reds, blues, purples, and gold, changing from one to the other in the reflected light. In the texture were the tracings of fossil forms of ferns and the most exquisite and delicate vegetable beauty of the coal age.

Why will you insist on being so romantic? Why can't you look at life through a plain sheet of glass if you must look at it through something instead of choosing the red and the yellow and the purples anything but the plain, the untinted reality. Go and get your settlement. Make him put it in black and white, and shove his name down at the bottom.

Truly it was a glory to behold a perfect panorama of rioting greens, yellows, browns, blues, reds, grays, crimsons, purples, in fact, every colour which an artist's palette could carry; and through it all was ever woven a mass of lace-like brilliant white that dazzled the eyes of the beholder. Only once in fifty years have I beheld a scene so enchanting.

Some of the most beautiful blues and purples in nature, for instance, are those of mountains in shadow against amber sky; and the darkness of the hollow in the centre of a wild rose is one glow of orange fire, owing to the quantity of its yellow stamens.

There was a look in his face as if he could just eat those oranges and purples, and soft greens; and there was a sort of passionate assurance in the way in which he handled his brushes, and delicately plunged them here and there in his colour-box, that spoke a master.

But the Cypræas were beautiful, too, and of every colour, from white or palest amber to deep sullen purples and browns that melted into ebony.