. . .he thing for which he has longed, upward from the cradle; that one bereaved, the dead glorified, and that one coming hard in avarice, red and yellow gold.

The bay of Oban on such a morning, under such a sun, surpasses in striking beauty the bay of Naples. The colors of the sea seem to come from below upward. The Firth of Lorn is then the vat of some master alchemist, wherein lies every color and every shade of color, varying with the light, the angle of incidence, the traveling of clouds; and yet, always, the waters of that vat are green, viscous, sinister. The rocks, rising out of this sea, look old, wrinkled, drab. The mountains, hemming it in, seem in the first lights of the morning covered loosely with mantles of worn, gray velvet—soft, streaked with great splashes of pink powder, as though some careless beauty had spilled her cosmetic over the cover of her table.

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