Gordon Stables

“ The Gloaming Star standing in towards the land, which looks like a long low greenish cloud on the horizon. The sky is a burning blue, the day is hot and sultry, and the pitch boils in the seams of the deck. Land birds, some very pretty, and hosts of butterflies as large as small fans, and surpassingly radiant in colour, are hovering about the vessel. Medusae, like open umbrellas, and whose limbs seem studded with gems, float around the ship, while now and than huge turtles can be seen, each one as big and as broad as a blacksmith’s bellows. ”

“ Captain Fitzroy, looking seaward. The ocean is a sheet of blue, with patches of green here and there, where cloud shadows fall, and sails like sea-birds far away towards the horizon.
“What a heavenly day, to be sure! Why, there is health in every breath one inhales on this delightful coast. Don’t you feel cosy now and happy in this sweet little cottage? Nothing to do. Nothing to think about except the absent ones. No care, no worry except that of making war upon the weeds in your little garden. I declare to you, Lyle, my lad, I consider such a life as you now lead in a manner quite idyllic.” ”

“ Captain Blunt and party making their way along the bottom of the cañon, which in many places is deep in drifted snow.
Who can paint in words the beauty, the glory of a sunrise among the mountains? Why wish to be a poet—even a Longfellow?
Why wish to be even a Turner? for what artist that ever lived could sketch in colour the deep blue of yonder sky, or the great grey clouds that, even as we look change slowly to yellow and gold; or that strip of crimson, or the darkness of those pine trees outshining from the blue uncertain horizon’s haze? ”

“ The rope was again lowered, and Leonard mounted next, and not a minute too soon.
“Look, look, look!” cried Bland, pointing away to windward. “Run for our lives!”
A strange sight it was, that awful coming squall. Right away in the wind’s eye was a long dark cloud, fringed beneath with a line of white. Forked lightning played incessantly across it, or fell through it like streams of blood or fire. It grew higher and higher as it came nearer and nearer; then with a rush and a roar it swept upon the island, and the very lighthouse seemed to rock in the awful embrace. ”

“ In this room is Leonard’s and Effie’s library of old-fashioned picture-books, and many toys, and a little couch near the nicely-curtained window, on which it is delightful to recline on a lovely summer evening and read while dreamy, old-fashioned music is being played by a huge musical box that stands on a table, and while a breeze, laden with the odours of the woods and the wild flowers, is stealing in at the open window, and toying with the crimson curtains. ”

“ On came the white horses. It was a race between the barque and the gale of wind. Before her loomed the rocky promontory. The cliffs rose straight up out of the sea, and their heads were buried in haze. Close to the wind sailed the barque, as close as ever could be.
On and on she speeds, but the white horses are almost close aboard of her.
“Hands, shorten sail!”
The wind is on her. To shorten sail now were madness. The wind is on her, the brave ship leans over to it, till the water rushes in through the lee scuppers.
The wind increases in force every moment. ”

“ The wind blows higher and higher. It tears across the frozen lake—a bitter, biting, cutting blast; there is hardly any facing it. Even dogs and Indians bend their heads downwards, and present their shoulders to the wind.
The skin garments of the Esquimos, the coats of the dogs, and beards and hair of the sailors are massed and lumped with frozen snow, and cheeks and ears are coated with ice as if they had been glazed.
Struggling on thus for hours, they cross the lake at last, and gain the shelter of a pine wood. Here wood is gathered, and after much ado a fire is lighted. ”

“ The gardens around Grayling House were indeed a wildery, yet not a wilderness. It was the pleasure of their owner to let all growing things have a good deal of their own way. For he loved nature even more than art. So in summer time the big lawn that stretched down as far as the quiet river’s bank—where the trailing willows kissed the water, and the splendidly bedecked kingfishers darted in and out from sunshine and shade—was carpeted with flowers, buttercups and daisies and nodding plumes of grasses, and clover white and red. ”

“ No sun, no light save moon or stars and the lovely aurora. Silence deep as the grave, except—which was rare—when a storm came howling over the pack, raising the snow in whirlwinds, and often hurling off the peaked and jagged tops of the weird-looking icebergs.
But the sun appeared at last, and in due time. With a noise and confusion that is indescribable the ice broke up, and the Fairy Queen began to move slowly—oh, so slowly!—through the ice on her way southwards, with danger on every quarter, danger ahead, and danger astern. She sailed for many, many miles without a rudder ”

“ A ship on her beam ends, not far off the coast of Norway, the seas all around her houses high; their tops cut short off by the force of the wind, and the spray driven over the seemingly doomed ship, like the drift in a moorland snowstorm. The sky is clear, there is a yellow glare in the west where the sun went down. A full moon riding high in a yellow haze.
A gale of wind got out of its cave—for according to the ancients the winds do live in a cave. ”

“ We observe that the gravel on the path, and all round the palace, as we may well call it, is as white as snow. It is a mixture of shells and sea sand, brought all the way from the beach at the mouth of the Tweed, and being so white, it looks in charming contrast to the greenery of trees and grass.
But what strikes a grown-up person most here, is that everything about him is in miniature, dwarfed, as it were; the very bushes and shrubs have the appearance of being old, and yet they are excessively small. ”

“ In this great chart that lies before me, a chart of the Polar regions, I can point out the very place, or near it, where the Fairy Queen was crushed in the ice as a strong man might crush a walnut, and sank like a stone in the water, dragging down with her, so quickly did she go at last, more than one of her brave crew, whose bones may lie in the black depths of that inhospitable ocean,—
“Till the sea gives up its dead.” ”

“ The great whales, the mighty sharks, and the huge sea-elephants, that for days they had seen tumbling and wallowing in the waters round the vessel, suddenly disappeared, and even the birds ceased to go whirling and screaming through the air, and one evening they seemed sailing into the blackness of darkness. There was a good breeze behind them, but as night fell—and it came on before its time—so did the wind. And so the ship lay becalmed, or nearly so. No one went to bed that night. The darkness was a darkness that could be felt ”

“ But the house won’t seem the same, Effie, when you and Leonard are gone away—heigho!”
“Well,” said Effie, “I’ll be so sorry to go, and yet so glad.”
“Tell us a story,” said Leonard, “and change the subject. Hush! what was that?”
A wild and mournful scream it was, and sounded close under the window.
“That is a cry we often hear,” said the old lighthouse keeper, “always before a storm, sometimes before a wreck. It’s a bird, I suppose, or maybe a mermaid. Do I believe in them? I do. I’ll tell you a strange dream I had once upon a time, though I don’t think it could have been a dream.” ”

“ No beetle or other insect was there, in all the romantic country through which they passed on their way to and from school, that they did not know all about; every wild flower was a friend; and the little furry denizens of the forest, that dwelt in old tree stumps, or had their cosy nests among the verdant moss or the beds of pine-needles—all knew them, and never fled at their approach. ”

“ No, for the white men now engaged in a hand-to-hand combat with those daring savages are men of a different class from the honest crew of the Gloaming Star.
The sound of the battle grows fainter and fainter, till it ceases entirely.
Leonard and Douglas wait and watch, trying to peer through the smoke, and unravel, if possible, some of the mystery that has been taking place below.
Dimly through the haze at last they can notice figures dressed in white clambering up the hill.
“Come out at once, you white fellows,” cries a bold English voice. “Come forth, if you don’t want to be roasted alive. ”

“ Both Douglas Fitzroy and Leonard Lyle were, as mere children, fond of the sea. What British boy is not? A ship had always had a strange fascination for each of them. When much younger they had often been taken by their parents to Glasgow, and they preferred a stroll among the shipping at the Broomielaw to even a saunter in the park itself. Beautiful in summer though the park might have been in those days—and there was but one—it was in Leonard’s eyes too artificial. The lad loved Nature, but he liked to meet her and to woo her in the woods and wilds. ”

“ Soon after this Leonard himself went on deck. Here was his friend Douglas, muffled up in a monkey-jacket with a sou’-wester on his head, and great woollen gloves on his hands, tramping up and down the deck as if for a wager.
“How do you like it, Doug?”
“Ha!” said Douglas, “you’re laughing, are you? Well, your watch comes on at four in the morning. There won’t be much laughing then, lad. How delightful the warm bed will seem when—”
“There, there, Douglas, pray don’t bring your imagination to bear on it. It will be bad enough without that.” ”

“ The interior of a cave on a lonely hillside; a huge fire of wood and peat is burning in a kind of recess hewn from the solid rock. A large cauldron is boiling over it, and the smoke and flames are roaring up the chimney. Wild-looking men, unkempt and unshorn, are eating and drinking on stone benches around the cave. There is a big oil lamp hanging from the roof, and that and the firelight shed a dim uncertain light throughout the cave.
“And so,” said one of the men, who appeared to be captain of this gang of smugglers, “Captain Bland and his fellows have promised to be here to-night.” ”

“ Captain Lyle. “Yes, dear, because he and honest Douglas are in the regions of thick-ribbed ice, you know; and once it embraces a ship, it is difficult to get clear. But cheer up, lass; I won’t have you fretting, there! Now, promise me you—ha! here comes dear old Fitzroy, swinging away on his wooden leg. Good-afternoon, my friend; there is need of you here. My wife and daughter are doing nothing but fretting.”
Captain Fitzroy. “Oh! come, Effie, come, Mrs Lyle. Look at me; I don’t fret. The boys will return as sure as the sun will rise to-morrow.” ”

“ But hark! what was that wild, unearthly yell in the rear of the foe?
All listened. The savages who had been coming on again towards the fort fell back. The cries and yells were redoubled, and the din was horrible, awful!
“Hurrah!” cried Blunt, “we are saved! The friendlies have come!”
And so it was. The battle in the bush raged for fully an hour, then up rushed the scout who had so bravely done his duty. The drawbridge was lowered, and in he dashed, and after him fully a hundred of his own tribe, all in their war-paint, all fully armed, and, ghastly sight! ”

“ I don’t know, no more than Adam, what I could have been thinking about, but I crept out of my bunk in the state-room, where also the doctor and steward slept, and up on deck I went. I wondered to myself more than once if I really was in a dream. But there were sails and rigging, and the stars all shining, and the ship bobbing and curtseying to the dark waters, that went swishing and lapping alongside of her, and all awfully real for a dream. I could hear the men talking round the fo’c’s’le, and smell their tobacco, too. ”

“ But what do the whales do at this garden party of theirs? Sail quietly round and look at each other? Discuss the possibility of uniting in a body, and driving all the whaling fleet to the bottom of the sea? Consider the prospects of the shrimp harvest, or debate upon the best methods of extracting a harpoon from fin or tail, and the easiest method of capsizing a boat? No; nothing of the sort. They have met together to enjoy themselves, and in their own exceedingly cumbersome way they do enjoy themselves. They enjoy themselves with a force and a vengeance that is terrible to witness. ”

“ They had already passed, on the wings of a favouring breeze, very many little islands, some mere coral reefs green-fringed with trees, looking as if they were afloat in the sea or in the sky’s blue. But although they had seen natives both in canoes and on the beach they had made no attempt to communicate with the Gloaming Star.
Men were kept constantly in the chains, and when the water became too shallow, or breakers ahead were seen frothing on a shallow green reef, her way was stopped and the course altered. By night they often cast anchor. ”

“ There were paths through this wildery that seemed to lead nowhere, and as often as not made pretence of taking you straight back towards the house again, but landed you at last perhaps in a greenwood glade, with broad-leaved sycamores, and elms around, in which blackbirds fluted in spring, thrushes piped, and the chaffinch tried to drown the notes of every other bird with his mad merry melody. And here perhaps was a rockery, with a fountain playing and a streamlet trickling away riverwards, through the greenest of grass. ”

“ Why bother yourself about the death of a poor pike, man? Come, Peter; I fear that you are positively getting old.”
“By the way, Effie,” he added, turning to his daughter, “run and see how your mother is.”
Effie went away. She was used to obey. Dearly loved though she was by both her parents, she had many lonely sad hours now that her brother had become a wanderer, only to appear now and then at Glen Lyle to stay for a short time, he and Douglas, then disappear, and leave such a gloom behind that she hardly cared to live. ”

“ A green hill or knoll rising with a gentle sweep from the woods near Grayling House, on one side gigantic elm trees, with rooks busy nest-making. On the other, at the rock foot, the dark deep loch. Behind the hill, as far as the eye can see, a forest dotted with spring-green larches and dark waving pines; blue mountains beyond, and a bright sun shining down on all from a sky of cloudless blue.
It is early morning, but those rooks have been at it long before the beams of the rising sun capped the hills with crimson. There are many other voices in the woods ”