brown and in places black with fire, but a blaze of red purple, a rich
mantle of bloom. Even now, early in July, the sun had a little power. I
cannot say it would have been warm had there been the least motion in
the air, for seldom indeed could one there from the south grant that
the wind had no keen edge to it; but on this morning there was absolute
stillness, and although it was not easy for Kirsty to imagine any
summer air other than warm, yet the wind's absence had not a little to
do with the sense of luxurious life that now filled her heart. She sat
on her favourite grassy slope near the foot of the cone-shaped Horn,
looking over the level miles before her, and knitting away at a ribbed
stocking of dark blue whose toe she had nearly finished, glad in the
thought, not of rest from her labour, but of beginning the yet more
important fellow-stocking. She had no need to look close at her work to
keep the loops right; but she was so careful and precise that, if she
lived to be old and blind, she would knit better then than now. It was
to her the perfect glory of a summer day; and I imagine her delight in
the divine luxury greater than that of many a poet dwelling in softer
climes.

The spot where she sat was close by the turf-hut which I have already
described. At every shifting of a needle she would send a new glance
all over her world, a glance to remind one somehow of the sweep of a
broad ray of sunlight across earth and sea, when, on a morning of upper
wind, the broken clouds take endless liberties with shadow and shine.
What she saw I cannot tell; I know she saw far more than a stranger
would have seen, for she knew her home. His eyes would, I believe, have
been drawn chiefly to those intense spots of live white, opaque yet
brilliant, the heads of the cotton-grass here and there in thin patches
on the dark ground. For nearly the whole of the level was a peat-moss.
Miles and miles of peat, differing in quality and varying in depth, lay