Chapter Eighteen.
“Summer Comes with one Glad Bound”—Fire!
Spring or early summer is to all a season of hope and joy, but no one who has never lived in the drear cold regions around the Pole in winter could understand or appreciate the glad feeling that is born in the heart when the sun once more ascends his throne and rules triumphant in all the land.
Some reason or other may be ascribed for all religions and forms of worship, even the most heathenish; and I have never been astonished to see a pious Eskimo Indian with his family kneel or throw himself on his face before the god of day, though I have felt sorry for him and for them.
“But yonder comes the powerful king of day,
Rejoicing in the east. The lessening cloud,
The kindling azure, and the mountains’ brow
Illumed with fluid gold, his near approach
Betoken glad.
He looks in boundless majesty abroad
And sheds the shining day, that burnished play,
On rocks, and hills, and towers, and wandering streams
High-gleaming from afar.”
Summer seemed to come to the rocks and hills around the sea of Dunallan with one glad bound. There were some few days of fog or mist, so dense that it was impossible even to see the point of the jibboom. This fog was, as it were, the curtain of Nature’s great theatre, dropped for a time while the grand transformation scene was being put on the stage behind it.
Then it was withdrawn—lifted, and behold summer on the hills, summer in the glens. Glad streams and cataracts sparkling in the sunshine, the mountain-tops capped in silvery snow, streaks of silver running down their brown, white-flecked sides, but the ground all carpeted with green, which in a few days burst forth into the most charming variety of colours.
The sea itself was scarcely rippled by the gentle breeze that blew steadily from the west; the air was so fresh and balmy that it was a pleasure to breathe it. Everything seemed to feel the touch of the newly come summer, and to rejoice. Flocks of birds of innumerable varieties went wheeling and circling round the ship, or floated on the water; there was music even in their wild glad shrieks.