6 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
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 midday, and I went to enjoy my half- 
hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighboring 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 moyeless 
in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. Froma 
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 Wevis 
rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of win- 
ter, 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 de- 
scribed as tasking the ingenuity of his future son-in-law, by 
giving him, as a subject for his pencil, a flower-piece com- 
posed of only white flowers, of which the one half were to 
bear their proper color, 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 transpar- 
ent 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 that a very exquisite 
pleasure may be a very cheap one, and that the busiest em 
ployments may afford leisure enough to enjoy it. 
