The fresh sweet air from pine woods, the cool vapours from the water beneath him, were nurses of wise and delicate touch.

The sun arose and shone warmly, yet not hotly, through the air in which dry haze was thickening.

The dead trees stood in the calm water, keeping silence as it were, a hundred stalwart guards with fingers at their lips, lest any sound should disturb the life that, with beneficent patience, was little by little restoring the wounded body from within.

Even the little vulgar puffing market-boat that twice a day passed the windings of the old river channel--the only disturber of solitude--was kept at so great a distance by this guard of silent trees that no perception of her passing, and all the life and perplexity of which she must remind him, entered into Toyner's half-closed avenues of sense.
For two days the sun rose on Bart through the mellow, smoke-dimmed atmosphere.

Each night it lay in a red cloud for an hour in the west, tingeing and dyeing all the mirror below the trees with red.