dows of the trees stretching downwards towards the shore.

This was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I had so
much dreaded. To be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly
as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had
wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as
usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening, converted by a
rare transmutation into the delicious "blink of rest," which Burns so
truthfully describes, was all my own. I was as light of heart next
morning as any of my fellow-workmen. There had been a smart frost during
the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onwards
through the fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day
mellowed, as it advanced, into one of those delightful days of early
spring which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial
in the better half of the year! All the workmen rested at mid-day, and
I went to enjoy my half-hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighbouring
wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and
the opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in
the sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had
been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half-way
across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose
straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and
then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every
side like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wyvis rose to the west,
white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined
in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring
hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the
opposite hills; all above was white, and all below was purple. They
reminded me of the pretty French story, in which an old artist is
described as tasking the ingenuity of his future son-in-law by giving
him as a subject for his pencil a flower-piece composed of only white
flowers, of which the one-half were to bear their proper colour, the
other half a deep purple hue, and yet all be perfectly natural; and
how the young man resolved the riddle, and gained his mistress, by
introducing a transparent purple vase into the picture, and making the
light pass through it on the flowers that were drooping over the edge. I
returned to the quarry, convinced