Page:The Life of the Fields, Jefferies, 1884.djvu/115

Rh with pale hues, flushes over a rich violet, soon again overlaid with orange, and succeeded in its turn by a deep red glow—a glow which looks the deeper the more it is gazed at, like a petal of peony. There are no fair faces in the street now, they are all brunettes, fair complexions and dark skins are alike tinted by the sunset; they are all swarthy. On the sea a dull redness reaches away and is lost in the vapour on the horizon; eastwards great vapours, tinged rosy, stand up high in the sky, and seem to drift inland, carrying the sunset with them; presently the atmosphere round the houses is filled with a threatening light, like a great fire reflected over the housetops. It fades, and there is nothing left but a dark cloud at the western horizon, tinted blood-red along its upper edge. Next morning the sun rises, a ball of orange amid streaks of scarlet.

But sometimes the sunset takes other order than this, and after the orange there appears a rayed scarlet crown, such as one sees on old coins—rays of scarlet shoot upward from a common centre above where the sun went down. Sometimes, instead of these brilliant hues, there is the most delicate shading of pearly greys and nameless silver tints, such tints as might be imagined were the clouds like feathers, the art of which is to let the under hue shine through the upper layer of the plumage. Though not so gaudy or at first so striking, these pearl-greys, and silvers, and delicate interweaving of tints are really as wonderful, being graduated and laid on with a touch no camel's hair can approach. Sometimes, again, the sunset shows a burnished sky, like the surface of old copper burnt or oxidized—the copper tinted with rose, or with rose