WINTER ASPECTS 205 



the simple life in a fresh sense to have moorland 

 donkeys and conies, and daws, gulls and yellow- 

 hammers, instead of men for company ; creatures 

 whose lowly minds do not baffle us. I doubt if even 

 the wildest American of the " new school of natural 

 history " would maintain that these friends in fur and 

 feathers possess the faculty of imagination in any 

 degree. It was very pleasant and restful to sit on a 

 granite boulder on the hillside and gaze by the hour, 

 thinking of nothing, on the blue expanse of ocean 

 and the more ethereal blue of the sky beyond, with 

 perhaps a few floating white clouds and soaring white 

 gulls in the void to add to the sense of height and 

 vastness. 



There is no question that the best days in the 

 six months from October to March, which are more 

 or less charged with gloom in these northern realms, 

 are those rare days when the sky is clear, the wind 

 still, and the sun floods the world with light and heat. 

 Such days are apt to be warmer here than in other 

 parts ; even the adder, hibernating in his deep dark 

 den beneath the rocks, is stirred by the heavenly in- 

 fluence, and crawls forth on a midwinter day to lie 

 basking in the delicious beams. And the entire 

 visible world, sea and land, is a glittering serpent, 

 its discontent now forgotten, slumbering peacefully, 

 albeit with wide-open eyes, in the face of the sun. 



Here, in such weather, the futility of all our 

 efforts, whether with pen or pencil, to convey the 

 picture to another has forced itself on me. Some of 

 the details in a description are visualised and remain, 



