"If this weather will only last!" was our earnest sigh as we walked home; and anxious not to lose a minute of it, we gave ourselves the briefest rest, and turned out again, I to watch the sunset from the cliffs, while the others descended once more to their beloved sea-pools.
"Such anemones, such sea-weed! and scrambling is so delicious! Besides, sunsets are all alike," added the youthful, practical, and slightly unpoetical mind.
No, they are not alike. Every one has a mysterious charm of its own—just like that in every new human face. I have seen hundreds of sunsets in my time, and those I shall see are narrowing down now, but I think to the end of my life I shall always feel a day incomplete of which I did not see the sunset.
This one was splendid. The usual place where the sun dropped into the sea, just beyond the point of the Land's End, was all a golden mist. I hastened west, climbing one intervening cliff after the other, anxious not to miss the clear sight of him as he set his glowing feet, or rather his great round disc, on the sea. At last I found a "comfortable" stone, sheltered from the wind, which blew tolerably fresh, and utterly solitary (as I thought), the intense silence being such that one could almost hear the cropping of three placid sheep—evidently well accustomed to sunsets, and thinking them of little consequence.
There I sat until the last red spark had gone out, quenched in the Atlantic waters, and from behind the vanished sun sprung a gleam of absolutely green light, "like a firework out of a rocket," the young people said; such as I had never seen before, though we saw it once afterwards. Nature's fireworks they were; and I could see even the two little black figures moving along the rocks below stand still to watch them. I watched too, with that sort of lonely delight—the one shadow upon it being that it is so lonely—with which all one's life one is accustomed to watch beautiful and vanishing things. Then seeing how fast the colours were fading and the sky darkening, I rose; but just took a step or two farther to look over the edge of my stone into the next dip of the cliff, and there I saw—
HAULING IN THE BOATS—EVENING.
Actually, two human beings! Lovers, of course. Nothing else would have sat so long and so silently, for I had been within three yards of them all the time, and had never discovered them, nor they me. Poor young things! they did not discover me even yet. They sat, quite absorbed in one another, hand in hand, looking quietly seaward, their faces bathed in the rosy sunset—which to them was a sunrise, the sort of sun which never rises twice in a life-time.
I left them to it. Evidently they did not see me, in fact I just peered over the rock's edge and drew back again; any slight sound they probably attributed to the harmless sheep. Well, it was but an equally harmless old woman, who did not laugh at them, as some might have done, but smiled and wished them well, as she left them to their sunset, and turned to face the darkening east, where the sun would rise to-morrow.