The Real Charlotte. 39 



himself down with a complacent sarcasm on Francie's 

 method of holding her whip, and, as they rode on, he per- 

 mitted to himself the semi-proprietary enjoyment of an 

 agent in pointing out boundaries, and landmarks, and im- 

 provements. 



They had ridden at first under a pale green arch of road- 

 side trees, with fields on either side full of buttercups and 

 dog-daisies, a land of pasture and sleek cattle, and neat 

 stone walls. But in the second or third mile the face of the 

 country changed. The blue lake that had lain in the dis- 

 tance like a long slab of lapis lazuli, was within two fields of 

 them now, moving drowsily in and out of the rocks, and 

 over the coarse gravel of its shore. The trees had dwindled 

 to ragged hazel and thorn bushes ; the fat cows of the com- 

 fortable farms round Lismoyle were replaced by lean, di- 

 shevelled goats, and shelves and flags of grey limestone 

 began to contest the right of the soil with the thin grass and 

 the wiry brushwood. We have said grey limestone, but 

 that hard-worked adjective cannot at all express the cold, 

 pure blueness that these boulders take, under the sky of 

 summer. Some word must yet be coined in which neither 

 blue nor lilac shall have the supremacy, and in which the 

 steely purple of a pigeon's breast shall not be forgotten. 



The rock was everywhere. Even the hazels were at last 

 squeezed out of existence, and inland, over the slowly swell- 

 ing hills, it lay like the pavement of some giant city, that 

 had been jarred from its symmetry by an earthquake. A 

 mile away, on the further side of this iron belt, a clump of 

 trees rose conspicuously by the lake side, round a two- 

 storied white house, and towards these trees the road wound 

 its sinuous way. The grass began to show in larger and 

 larger patches between the rocks, and the indomitable 

 hazels crept again out of the crannies, and raised their low 

 canopies over the heads of the browsing sheep and goats. 

 A stream, brown with turf-mould, and fierce with battles 

 with the boulders, made a boundary between the stony 

 wilderness and the dark green pastures of Gurthnamuckla. 

 It dashed under a high-backed little bridge with such ex- 

 citement that the black mare, for all her intelligence, curved 

 her neck, and sidled away from the parapet towards Lam- 

 bert's horse. 



