Page:Ethel Churchill 1.pdf/120

114 air which encourages your own, and the poetry of memory is in every drooping flower and falling leaf. The very magnificence of its Assyrian array is touched with the light of imagination: even while you watch it, it passes away as your brightest hopes have done before. The lake, on whose bank Courtenaye and his uncle were standing, was just then an object of singular beauty. The sky was reflected in its depths in huge masses of crimson shadow, which softened away into a deep purple mirror, clear and motionless, saving when the swans swept slowly across, leaving behind a vein of violet light. "Can you," said Norbourne, "be quite insensible to the beauty of a scene like this? It enters into my very heart: I feel a kindlier disposition to the whole human race." "Nay, nay," exclaimed Lord Norbourne, "I cannot go quite so far as that. I have, thanks to your hospitality, laid in a stock of health enough for the ensuing winter: but as to the general benevolence of which you talk, I confess I find no symptoms: if I did,