t of
basking in the sunshine, and followed the others.

He soon found himself settled at the furthest end of a long narrow loch,
made longer and narrower by the steep hillside of rock and heather which
flanked its chilly surface on either side, and whose inequalities were
lost in the firs and larches that filled ravine and chasm. The fragrant
road which ran sinuously through their shadowy depths was invisible from
the loch; no protuberance broke the seemingly sheer declivity; the even
sky-line was indented in two places--one where it was cracked into a
fanciful resemblance to a human profile, the other where it was curved
like a bowl. Need it be said that one was distinctly recognized as
the silhouette of a prehistoric giant, and that the other was his
drinking-cup; need it be added that neither lent the slightest human
suggestion to the solitude? A toy-like pier extending into the loch,
midway from the barren shore, only heightened the desolation. And when
the little steamboat that occasionally entered the loch took away a
solitary passenger from the pier-head, the simplest parting was invested
with a dreary loneliness that might have brought tears to the most
hardened eye.

Still, when the shadow of either hillside was not reaching across the
loch, the meridian sun, chancing upon this coy mirror, made the most of
it. Then it was that, seen from above, it flashed like a falchion lying
between the hills; then its reflected glory, striking up, transfigured
the two acclivities, tipped the cold heather with fire, gladdened the
funereal pines, and warmed the ascetic rocks. And it was in one of those
rare, passionate intervals that the consul, riding along the wooded
track and turning his eyes from their splendors, came upon a little
house.

It had once been a sturdy cottage, with a grim endurance and
inflexibility which even some later and lighter additions had softened
rather than changed. On either side of the door, against the bleak
whitewashed wall, two tall fuchsias relieved the rigid blankness with a
show of color. The windows were prettily draped with curtains caught up
with gay ribbons. In a stony pound-like enclosure there was some attempt
at floral cultivation, but all quite recent. So, too, were a wicker
garden seat, a bright Japanese umbrella, and a tropical hammock
suspended between two arctic-looking bushes, which the rude and rigid
forefathers of the hamlet would have probably resented.

He had just pass