“Here,” said Lady Arthur, raising her glass to her lips—­“here is to the memory of the Romans, on whose dust we are resting.”

“Amen!” said Mr. Eildon; “but I am afraid you don’t find their dust a very soft resting-place:  they were always a hard people, the Romans.”

“They were a people I admire,” said Lady Arthur.  “If they had not been called away by bad news from home, if they had been able to stay, our civilization might have been a much older thing than it is.—­What do you think, John?” she said, addressing her faithful servitor.  “Less than a thousand years ago all that stretch of country that we see so richly cultivated and studded with cozy farm-houses was brushwood and swamp, with a handful of savage inhabitants living in wigwams and dressing in skins.”

“It may be so,” said John—­“no doubt yer leddyship kens best—­but I have this to say:  if they were savages they had the makin’ o’ men in them.  Naebody’ll gar me believe that the stock yer leddyship and me cam o’ was na a capital gude stock.”

“All right, John,” said Mr. Eildon, “if you include me.”

“It was a long time to take, surely,” said Alice—­“a thousand years to bring the country from brushwood and swamp to corn and burns confined to their beds,”

“Nature is never in a hurry, Alice,” replied Lady Arthur.

“But she is always busy in a wonderfully quiet way,” said Miss Adamson.  “Whenever man begins to work he makes a noise, but no one hears the corn grow or the leaves burst their sheaths:  even the clouds move with noiseless grace.”

“The clouds are what no one can understand yet, I suppose,” said Mr. Eildon, “but they don’t always look as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, as they are doing to-day.  What do you say to thunder?”

“That is an exception:  Nature does all her best work quietly.”

“So does man,” remarked George Eildon.

“Well, I dare say you are right, after all,” said Miss Adamson, who was sketching.  “I wish I could paint in the glitter on the blade of that reaping-machine down in the haugh there:  see, it gleams every time the sun’s rays hit it.  It is curious how Nature makes the most of everything to heighten her picture, and yet never makes her bright points too plentiful.”

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.”