Just at that moment the sun's rays seized a small pane of glass in the roof of a house two or three miles off down the valley, and it shot out light and sparkles that dazzled the eye to look at.
"That is a fine effect," cried Alice: "it looks like the eye of an archangel kindling up,"
"What a flight of fancy, Alice!" Lady Arthur said. "That reaping-machine does its work very well, but it will be a long time before it gathers a crust of poetry about it: stopping to clear a stone out of its way is different from a lad and a lass on the harvest-rig, the one stopping to take a thorn out of the finger of the other."
"There are so many wonderful things," said Alice, "that one gets always lost among them. How the clouds float is wonderful, and that with the same earth below and the same heaven above, the heather should be purple, and the corn yellow, and the ferns green, is wonderful; but not so wonderful, I think, as that a man by the touch of genius should have made every one interested in a field-laborer taking a thorn out of the hand of another field-laborer. Catch your poet, and he'll soon make the machine interesting."
"Get a thorn into your finger, Alice," said George Eildon, "and I'll take it out if it is so interesting."
"You could not make it interesting," said she.
"Just try," he said.
"But trying won't do. You know as well as I that there are things no trying will ever do. I am trying to paint, for instance, and in time I shall copy pretty well, but I shall never do more."
"Hush, hush!" said Miss Adamson. "I'm often enough in despair myself, and hearing you say that makes me worse. I rebel at having got just so much brain and no more; but I suppose," she said with a sigh, "if we make the best of what we have, it's all right, and if we had well-balanced minds we should be contented."
"Would you like to stay here longer among the hills and the sheep?" said Lady Arthur. "I have just remembered that I want silks for my embroidery, and I have time to go to town: I can catch the afternoon train. Do any of you care to go?"