"Ah, but a very cruel one," said I.
"Sorry for it—shan't do it again, Mr Brail."
"Safe in that," thought I.
On coming to a cross-road, the Cornsticks struck off to the left, and, saying good-by, we stood on our course.
Nothing particular occurred until we were descending the hill into St Thomas in the Vale. The sun was shining brightly without a cloud. The jocund breeze was rushing through the trees, and dashing their masses of foliage hither and thither; turning up the silvery undersides of the leaves at one moment, and then changing their hues into all shades of green the next. The birds were glancing and chirping amongst the branches. The sleek cattle were browsing lazily and contentedly on the slope of the hill; and the merry negro gangs were shouting and laughing at their work—but the vulture was soaring over all in pride of place; eagle-like, far up in the clear blue firmament, as if the abominable bird had been the genius of the yellow fever, hovering above the fair face of nature, ready to stoop and blast it.
The sky gradually darkened—all cloudless as it was—for there was not a shred of vapour floating in its pure depths so big as the hand of the servant of the prophet. The gloom increased—not that kind of twilight that precedes the falling of the night—but a sort of lurid purple hue that began mysteriously to pervade the whole atmosphere, as if we had been looking forth on the landscape through a piece of glass stained with smoke.
"Heyday," said Felix, "what's the matter? I see no clouds, yet the sun is overcast. It increases;"—the oxen on the hill sides turned and looked over their shoulders with a puzzled look, as if they did not know what to make of it, no more than ourselves—"Can't be time to go home to take our night spell in that weary mill yet, surely?"
The large carrion crows rapidly declined in their flight, narrowing their sweeping circles gradually, until they pirouetted down, and settled, with outstretched wings, on the crags above us; startling forth half a dozen bats, and a slow sailing owl, the latter fluttering about as if scarcely awake, and then floating away steadily amongst the bushes, as if he had said—"Come, it must be the gloaming after all—so here goes for mousey."
The negroes suddenly intermitted the chipping and tinkling of their hoes, and the gabbling of their tongues, as they leant on the shanks of the former, and looked up. "Heigh, wurra can be come over de daylight, and no shell blow yet?"[[1]]
[[1]] The gangs are turned in at dinner-time by the sounding of a conch shell.