Heather and Snow | Page 6

dry
and brown and in places black with fire, but a blaze of red purple, a rich
mantle of bloom. Even now, early in July, the sun had a little power. I
cannot say it would have been warm had there been the least motion in
the air, for seldom indeed could one there from the south grant that the
wind had no keen edge to it; but on this morning there was absolute
stillness, and although it was not easy for Kirsty to imagine any
summer air other than warm, yet the wind's absence had not a little to
do with the sense of luxurious life that now filled her heart. She sat on
her favourite grassy slope near the foot of the cone-shaped Horn,
looking over the level miles before her, and knitting away at a ribbed
stocking of dark blue whose toe she had nearly finished, glad in the
thought, not of rest from her labour, but of beginning the yet more
important fellow-stocking. She had no need to look close at her work to
keep the loops right; but she was so careful and precise that, if she lived
to be old and blind, she would knit better then than now. It was to her
the perfect glory of a summer day; and I imagine her delight in the
divine luxury greater than that of many a poet dwelling in softer climes.
The spot where she sat was close by the turf-hut which I have already
described. At every shifting of a needle she would send a new glance
all over her world, a glance to remind one somehow of the sweep of a
broad ray of sunlight across earth and sea, when, on a morning of upper
wind, the broken clouds take endless liberties with shadow and shine.
What she saw I cannot tell; I know she saw far more than a stranger
would have seen, for she knew her home. His eyes would, I believe,
have been drawn chiefly to those intense spots of live white, opaque yet
brilliant, the heads of the cotton-grass here and there in thin patches on
the dark ground. For nearly the whole of the level was a peat-moss.
Miles and miles of peat, differing in quality and varying in depth, lay
between those hills, the only fuel almost of the region. In some spots it
was very wet, water lying beneath and all through its substance; in
others, dark spots, the sides of holes whence it had been dug, showed
where it was drier. His eyes would rest for a moment also on those

black spaces on the hills where the old heather had been burned that its
roots might shoot afresh, and feed the grouse with soft young sprouts,
their chief support: they looked now like neglected spots where men
cast stones and shards, but by and by would be covered with a tenderer
green than the rest of the hill-side. He would not see the moorland birds
that Kirsty saw; he would only hear their cries, with now and then
perhaps the bark of a sheep-dog.
My reader will probably conclude the prospect altogether uninteresting,
even ugly; but certainly Christina Barclay did not think it such. The girl
was more than well satisfied with the world-shell in which she found
herself; she was at the moment basking, both bodily and spiritually, in a
full sense of the world's bliss. Her soul was bathed in its own content,
calling none of its feelings to account. The sun, the air, the wide
expanse; the hill-tops' nearness to the heavens which yet they could not
invade; the little breaths which every now and then awoke to assert
their existence by immediately ceasing; doubtless also the knowledge
that her stocking was nearly done, that her father and mother were but a
mile or so away, that she knew where Steenie was, and that a cry would
bring him to her feet;--all these things bore each a part in making
Kirsty quiet with satisfaction. That there was, all the time, a deeper
cause of her peace, Kirsty knew well-the same that is the root of life
itself; and if it was not, at this moment or at that, filled with conscious
gratitude, her heart was yet like a bird ever on the point of springing up
to soar, and often soaring high indeed. Whether it came of something
special in her constitution that happiness always made her quiet, as
nothing but sorrow will make some, I do not presume to say. I only
know that, had her bliss changed suddenly to sadness, Kirsty would
have been quiet still. Whatever came to Kirsty seemed right, for there it
was!
She was now a girl of sixteen. The only sign she showed of interest