tural
disparaging cries, moving efficiently yet slowly, as if the direness of
the damage had made them lose all heart. Ellen stopped to watch them,
laying her neck over the top plank of the fence as a foal might do;
there was nothing that did not interest her. But after that it had
seemed a very ordinary green-and-grey piece of Scotland, and he thought
tenderly of her love of it as one of those happy delusions that come to
the very young, who see the world suffused with beauty even as a person
who looks out of half-opened eyes sees everything fringed with prismatic
hues.

But the road had lifted, a wildness had come on the hedge; where there
had been bushes were slim wind-distorted trees, and when the wall of the
trim little estate on the right came to an end they stood suddenly in
face of a broad view. To the right of the white road that drove forward
was a wide moor of dark moss-hags, flung like a crumpled cloth on a
slope that stretched as far as the eye could see to the base of black
hills about which clambered white mists. To the left were green fields,
set with tentative assemblies of firs, which finally, where the road
dipped, drew together in a long dark wood. These things were a delicate
frieze in front of a range of hills that rolled eastwards, the colour of
clouds and almost as formless as clouds, yet carving such proud lines
against the sky that they seemed to be crouched in attitudes of pride
and for all their low height had the austere and magnificent quality of
mountains. This was a country he could like very well. Against its
immensity human life appeared as unimportant as he did not doubt that it
was in those periods when his own private affairs were not pressing, and
it gave him such a sense of the personality of inanimate things as he
had very rarely had except at sea. The fir copse by which they stood
showed as much character as any ship in her behaviour under the weather,
and these mountains and this moor showed by a sudden pale glow of
response to a Jacob's ladder of sunlight that they changed in mood under
changing skies even as the seas.

Two or three whaups rose from the moss-hags and then sailed pee-weeting
towards the hills, as if despatched by the moor to warn them of the
coming of these strangers; and it was as if the range answered shortly,
"Ay, I ken that, I ken that." The broad view was as solemn as eternity,
and at the same time there was a dancing exhilaration in the air, which,
when