lilies held up before the window their tall wands of blossomed silver, delicately detached upon the background of immense blue sea. Two or three brown volumes that had been overlooked by the constable—there had been a couple more, but those Mrs. Callender had bestowed in gratitude upon the appreciative strangers—stood yet upon the shelves; a study of the Point done in Martin’s most dashing manner, hung over the capacious old hearth; and the tingling silence, as, standing still, I held my own breath in the little breathless space—it was a calm day, and there was no murmur from either pines or sea—felt as though it were holding back some lovely secret of its own, which must presently break forth and tell itself in noble harmonies.
What various lives had been lived in the old kitchen! The young husband and wife and the babies, first, normal as could be; after them, Miss Kirkcaldie the musician, mysterious, aloof, as yonder far horizon; next, Martin the painter, as radiant, as endearing, as evanescent as the summer flowers; and, last of all, the old philosopher with his august white head, sublimely illumined by the flush of posthumous fame as yonder snow-peaks would be soon by the afterglow.
It was strange how the old kitchen seemed to have been chosen from among its compeers in humility, here among the paddocks and the sheep, as a sanctuary for the life that springs, certainly, from the good sound soil of material existence, but wings its way above it; the life that leaves unconcernedly on one side all that is actual, practical, and personal; the detached life of the intellect and of Art.
