THE DEER FELS
Less than a day was consumed in making the ascent of the hills, which resembled steeply inclined moors, and on their summits we entered on a sunny (?) expanse, captivating in its loveliness of color, and ingratiatingly varied in topography. The tantalizing pinkish haze was explained. It was an endless billowy ocean of pale heather, with clumps of yellowness like gorse. As we looked over the entrancing picture in a golden light, in a freshening and tonic atmosphere, with a reverberant sense of being travelers in fairy land, a poem taught me long ago by an English friend came almost unbidden to my lips:
“‘What, you are stepping westward? Yea
’Twould be a wildish destiny
If we who thus together roam,
In a strange land and far from home,
Were in this place the guests of chance:
Yet who would stop, or fear to advance,
Though home or shelter he had none