ENJOYING THE INFLUENZA 287 



ness. Up and up it went, a thrilling thing to 

 watch, till I knew from certain landmarks that in 

 a moment I should see blue sky between it and 

 the summit of the shoulder. I suddenly saw the 

 blue sky, but not as a rift between the summit and 

 the lower edge of the curtain. The curtain was no 

 more ! It had mysteriously vanished into the blue- 

 and-gold glory of a perfect October day, and lo! 

 Noon, like a blithe young god, stood yellow-headed 

 on the mountain-top and reached for a billowing 

 cumulus to be his cloudy toy. 



Here my contemplation was slightly interrupted 

 by the arrival of the mail and a tray of dinner. It 

 is impossible for any one to record in these times 

 that the arrival of the daily paper leaves him indif- 

 ferent — or, if it is possible, he is surely an impossible 

 person. Yet when I turned my face once more to 

 the window, it was easy, under the spell of the 

 mountain, to slip again from the fetters of baffled 

 thought to the freedom of passive contemplation — 

 easy, and how great a relief! The sun was now in 

 the southwest and striking in on my bed. To the 

 northwest, where the shoulder of the mountain re- 

 cedes in a splendid curve, a haze of shadow was 

 already stealing out, and between me and the high 

 wall thus dusked rose a lower, near-by knoll, in full 

 sunshine, shutting out from my view the base of the 

 main wall. Both knoll and wall were tapestried 

 with the same greens and golds, but they were in 

 two distinct planes of light, and the sense of space 

 between them, the aerial perspective, was theatri- 

 cally intensified, exactly as it used to be in those 

 photographs we looked at through a stereoscope. I 



