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!"