Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/187

 For the first and only time in my life, I am happy and content in my environment. Of course there are some ugly old buildings that mar the picture,—but you know that we are told to look up, not down; and looking up, they are quite forgotten. Such a sky as we have here to-day,—blue as a harebell, and much the shape of one, its rim just resting upon this crown of dark firs; crawling up its western edge, a low line of white wreathing clouds, as if the sea, rolling high, were dashing its foam there. A luminous flood of sunshine is in the air, soft, caressing, and sweet with the aromatic breath of the fir trees; brooding over all is “Nature’s own exceeding peace,” a hush unusual even in this land of silence. I thought—as I often do here—of the stillness of Craigenputtoch, where “for hours the only sound is that of the sheep nibbling the short grass a quarter of a mile away;” of Carlyle writing his mother: “These are the grayest and most silent days I ever saw. My broom, as I sweep up the withered leaves, might be heard at a furlong’s distance.” I always think of that place as the dreariest on earth. “The house, gaunt and hungry-looking, standing in its scanty fields like an island in a sea of morass, the landscape unredeemed either by grace or grandeur,—mere undulating hills of grass and heather, with peat-bogs in the hollows.” What a home for the eager, ambitious, brilliant Jeannie Welsh Carlyle! Away from all the refinements of life, shut up in that