The evening was pitch dark: star and moon were quenched¹ in gray rain-clouds—gray they would have been by day; by night they looked sable². Malone was not a man given to close observation of nature; her changes passed, for the most part, unnoticed by him. He could walk miles on the most varying April day and never see the beautiful dallying³ of earth and heaven—never mark when a sunbeam kissed the hill-tops, making them smile clear in green light, or when a shower wept over them, hiding their crests⁵ with the low-hanging, dishevelled tresses of a cloud. He did not, therefore, care to contrast the sky as it now appeared—a muffled⁶, streaming vault⁷, all black, save where, towards the east, the furnaces of Stilbro' ironworks threw a tremulous lurid⁸ shimmer⁹ on the horizon—with the same sky on an unclouded frosty night. He did not trouble himself to ask where the constellations¹⁰ and the planets were gone, or to regret the "black-blue" serenity¹¹ of the air-ocean which those white islets stud, and which another ocean, of heavier and denser¹⁴ element, now rolled below and concealed¹⁵. He just doggedly¹⁶ pursued his way, leaning a little forward as he walked, and wearing his hat on the back of his head, as his Irish manner was. "Tramp, tramp," he went along the causeway, where the road boasted the privilege of such an accommodation; "splash, splash," through the mire-filled cart ruts, where the flags were exchanged for soft mud. He looked but for certain landmarks—the

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