Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/198

194

On a harvest afternoon, when the ripe grain, which clothed the western slope of the Cumberland hills, had partly submitted to the sickle, a party of reapers were seated on a small green knoll, enjoying the brief luxury of the dinner-hour. The young men lay stretched on the grass; the maidens sat plaiting and arranging their locks into more graceful and seducing ringlets; while three hoary old men sat abreast and upright, looking on the Sea of Solway, which was spread out, with all its romantic variety of headland and rock and bay, below them. The midday sun had been unusually sultry, accompanied with hot and suffocating rushings of wind; and the appearance of a huge and dark cloud, which hung, like a canopy of smoke and flame over a burning city, betokened, to an experienced swain, an approaching storm. One of the old reapers shook his head, and combing the remainder snow over his forehead with his fingers, said, "Woe's me! one token comes, and another token arises, of tempest and wrath on that darkening water.