of some elfin lawn held in an ancient enchantment by the hoar rocks.
They towered above, piled on and against each other as though flung by
freakish gods; from the fissures sprang wind-wilted thorns, now in young
leaf of a pure rich green, with thickly-clustered buds just breaking
into a dense snow of blossom. Periwinkles trailed down upon the turf,
and the closely set stonecrop made a reddish bloom on the lower
boulders, amidst bronze-hued moss, pale fragile scales of lichen, and
glossy leaved fibrous-rooted ivy, that all went to pattern their sullen
grey with delicate arabesques. The strongest note of colour was in the
wild hyacinths, that, where the earth had been disturbed at some time
and so given them a chance, made drifts of a deep blue that seemed
almost purple where they came against the paler azure of the sky.

The boys climbed to the flat top of the highest boulder, where the
gorse-bushes, some still darkly green, some breaking into yellow flame,
thrust their strong clumps from the rocky soil to stretch in a level
sea, inset with tracts of heath and bracken, for miles around. The whole
arc of the sky, the whole circle of the world's rim, lay bare to the
eye, infinitely varied by clouds and cloud-shadows, by pasture and
arable, dark patches of woods and pallor of pools, by the lambent
burnish of the west and the soft purpling of the east, even by differing
weathers--here great shafts of sunlight, there the blurred column of a
distant shower, or the faint smear, like a bruise upon the horizon, of a
low-hanging mist.

Killigrew lay on his stomach and gazed his fill, his thin nostrils
dilating rather like a rabbit's, as they always did if he were moved by
anything--a trick which, with his light eyelashes, had won for him the
name of "Bunny." Ishmael threw himself on his back and lay staring up at
the sky as it was slowly drawn past overhead, till with hard gazing the
whole world seemed spinning round him and the plummet of his sight was
drowned in the shifting heights that seemed to his reeling senses
bottomless depths. When Killigrew spoke he plucked his eyes from their
fixed stare with what was a physical effort and turned them giddily on
to the other boy's usually pale face, now copper-pink in the warm light.

"Why d'you suppose she don't like Doughty?" asked Killigrew.

"I dunno ...; he is rather a swine, anyway."

"Yes, but how does she know that?"

This was a poser, and Ishmael failed at an answer bey