The weary day was at length sinking peacefully to rest behind the distant hills. The packed and tumbled clouds lay heavily towards the West, where a gaunt jagged tower of rock rose sheer into the sky. And lo! suddenly a broad shaft of blood-red light shot through the brooding cumulus and rested gorgeously upon the landscape. On each side of this a thin silvery veil of mist crept slowly up and hung in impalpable folds. The Atlantic sand stretching away to the North shone with the effulgence of burnished copper. And now brilliant flickers of coloured light, saffron, purple, green and rose danced over the heaven's startled face. The piled clouds opened and showed in the interspace a lurid lake of blood tinged with the pale violet of an Irishwoman's eyes. Great pillars of flame sprang up rebelliously and spread over the burning horizon. Then a strange, soft, yellow and vaporous light raised its twelve bore breech-loading ejector to its shoulder and shot across the Cryanlaughin hills, and the cattle shone red in the green pastures, and everything else glowed, and the whole world burned with the bewildering glare of a stout publican's nose in a London fog. And silence came down upon the everlasting hills whose outlines gleamed in a prismatic--
"That will do," said a mysterious Voice, "the paint-box is exhausted!"
"Sir!" I said, "I cannot see you, though I hear your voice. Will you not disclose yourself?"
"Nonsense, man," said the aggravating, but invisible one, "do not waste time. Let us get on with the story. You know what comes next. _Revenons à nos saumons._ Ha, Ha! spare the rod and spoil the book!"
I was vexed, but I had to obey, and this was the result:
The pools were full of gleaming curves of silver, each one belonging to a separate salmon of gigantic size fresh run from the sea. The foaming Black Water tumbled headlong over its rocks and down its narrow channel. DONALD, the big keeper, stood industriously upon the bank arranging flies. "I hef been told," he observed, "tat ta English will be coming to Styornoway, and there will be no more Gaelic spoken. But perhaps it iss not true, for they will tell many lies. I am a teffle of a liar myself."
And lo! as we watched, the grey sky seemed to be split in two by an invisible wedge, and a purple gleam of light shot--