m the sun, there are white clouds, brown clouds, gray
clouds, and black clouds. Are these indeed--what they appear to
be--entirely distinct monastic disciplines of cloud: Black Friars,
and White Friars, and Friars of Orders Gray? Or is it only their
various nearness to us, their denseness, and the failing of the
light upon them, that makes some clouds look black[13] and others
snowy?

I can only give you qualified and cautious answer. There are, by
differences in their own character, Dominican clouds, and there are
Franciscan;--there are the Black Hussars of the Bandiera della
Morte, and there are the Scots Grays whose horses can run upon the
rock. But if you ask me, as I would have you ask me, why argent and
why sable, how baptized in white like a bride or a novice, and how
hooded with blackness like a Judge of the Vehmgericht Tribunal,--I
leave these questions with you, and pass on.

Admitting degrees of darkness, we have next to ask what color, from
sunshine can the white cloud receive, and what the black?

You won't expect me to tell you all that, or even the little that
is accurately known about that, in a quarter of an hour; yet note
these main facts on the matter.

On any pure white, and practically opaque, cloud, or thing like a
cloud, as an Alp, or Milan Cathedral, you can have cast by rising
or setting sunlight, any tints of amber, orange, or moderately deep
rose--you can't have lemon yellows, or any kind of green except in
negative hue by opposition; and though by stormlight you may
sometimes get the reds cast very deep, beyond a certain limit you
cannot go,--the Alps are never vermilion color, nor flamingo
color, nor canary color; nor did you ever see a full scarlet
cumulus of thundercloud.

On opaque white vapor, then, remember, you can get a glow or a
blush of color, never a flame of it.

But when the cloud is transparent as well as pure, and can be
filled with light through all the body of it, you then can have by
the light reflected[14] from its atoms any force conceivable by
human mind of the entire group of the golden and ruby colors, from
intensely burnished gold color, through a scarlet for whose
brightness there are no words, into any depth and any hue of Tyrian
crimson and Byzantine purple. These with full blue breathed between
them at the zenith, and green blue nearer the horizon, form the
scales and chords of color possible to the morning and evening sky
in pure and fine weather; the key