“Yes, sir. It’s the smoke. It’s been about a bit for a day or two. Now the wind’s to south, it’s gettin’ kind of thicker. There’s a big fire somewhere.”
“Might be a hundred miles away. ‘Heap big smudge,’ Polycarp says.”
“Look now,” said Lyndsay. “Try to get me these water-tints. Take a bit of it.”
“I can’t. What makes these colors? They are beyond me.”
“The sun must be back of you; the water near you—that is, you must be low down. Then the stone-tints of the river-bed are caught by the many changeful mirrors of the surface. It is, as you see, pretty well wave-broken here. Also, the general color is that of this yellow-red gravel slope opposite, mixed with the green of the trees.”
“Then,” said Anne, “it gets color—surface color—from within, and also from without, like one’s personality.”
“That is it, I see,” said Rose. “But the blue in the waves is so deep—deeper than the sky. It is intense indigo. More heavenly than heaven.”
“Yes, that is so. It is because, as we partly face the current, you look into the concavities of thousands of waves, and each condenses, so to speak, the blue of large sky spaces. Am I clear?”
“‘Each nobler soul inherits heaven’s largeness,’” quoted Anne.
“Thanks, aunty. The greenish gold of the surface is the color of the bank, made also deeper in hue because of being caught on the myriad rippling of the water.”
“How beautiful it is!—the flashing cupfuls of blue in among this bloom of green and gold. No one could paint it.”
“It is best at evening, Rose, but not at this point. There is a place some miles up where the general surface is silvered by a mass of white or light-gray granite, and in this you have set again the numberless wave-shells of indigo-blue—a dance of blue in silver.”
“Isn’t that smoke getting very much thicker? The colors are less brilliant now.”
“Yes, ma’am. The wind blows it up the gorges. Happen might smell it.”
“I do,” said Anne. “One can hardly see the farther hills.”
“Some men,” said Lyndsay, “fancy that it affects the fishing unfavorably; but two years ago, on the Cascapedia, the water was so saturated with smoke as to be undrinkable, and still the fish rose well. I wanted to study with you again, Rose, the purple color of the dead trees above us; but this smoke will somewhat affect it.”