Light still dying away! What was left only “dealt a doubtful sense of things not so much seen as felt.” And then it was that I realized what Robert Burns had sung:— “Gie me the hour o’ gloamin grey, For it mak’s my heart sae cheery O.” SKETCHES. SKETCHES of life upon the slabs of death Our loving hand on living stone indites: Sketches of death upon the screens of life Time, the great limner, for a warning writes. Sketches of joy upon the face of sorrow, Still credulous, our aching fingers trace: Time steals the pencil, and with bitter scorn, Sketches old sorrow on our young joy’s face. E’en so our sketch of life is framed and fashion’d; In vain with glowing touches we begin— By day we work upon the light and colour, Time comes by night and puts the shadows in. SKETCHES. A CONVERSATION. KATEY. “THERE! I have finished my sketch of the sloping field, and the misty strip of woodland above, in its autumn dress, by putting you in in the foreground, the only living thing in my misty-autumn picture; though, after all, you don’t look much more than a brown spot on the green, with your brown hat and skirt and your old brown book. I am much obliged to it for keeping you still so long this misty morning. What is there in it?” “Sketches,” I answered. “Misty sketches like this of yours.” And I stretched out my hand for my cousin’s drawing, while she looked over my shoulder down on to the volume on my knee and uttered an exclamation of surprise when her eye fell on nothing but black letters on a damp spotted yellow page. “‘Treating of the four complexions, into which men are bound during their sojourn in their earthly houses,’” she read aloud; “what does it mean? Let me look on. ‘Of those that draw their complexion from the dark and melancholy earth. Of those who take their complexion from the friendly air. Of those who are complexioned after the manner of fire. Of those who partake of the nature of the subtle and yielding water;’ who writes this queer stuff; is it sense or nonsense?” I held up the book that she might read the faded gilt letters on its wormeaten leather back. “Letters of Jacob Böhme to John Schauffman and others,” she read. “Oh!”—rather a doubtful “oh!” it was, as if the name did not settle the question about sense or nonsense as completely as she had expected it would. “This is rather a rare book I flatter myself,” I went on. “I bought it at a book-stall because it looked so odd and old, and found to my great joy that it was a miscellaneous collection of Jacob Böhme’s letters, on all sorts of subjects; the four that I have been reading this morning about the four different temperaments, or, as he calls it, complexions into which men may be divided, come in oddly enough among much more mystical and transcendental matter. They are, as I said, misty sketches of character, but I think they show that the dreamy old cobbler knew something about his fellow-men.”