the noon sun
But I would show you that life can be anything but commonplace in this wilderness . Well , blank or not , she had a lover , who had found her out in his sketching rambles , a young painter from some distant parts , and the first boarder I ever had , by the way . And all the Rayniers swore they would have his life sooner than he should have her . One day I had been hunting on old Mount Sorrow , as it happened ; there had been a sudden frost following rain that had frozen the water in the cracks of the cliffs , and made the way not only slippery , but dangerous ; for in the heat of the noon sun the ice was melting , and every now and then its expansion was rending some fragment of rock so that your footing might vanish from beneath , or some shower of stones come rattling down from above ; and I was tired when I reached the Raynier place , led by a blaze of maple boughs that started out like torches to show the way , and stopped to rest . I looked up at an enormous shelf of rock , half clad with reddened vines that fluttered like pestilence flags -- a shelf that , although some hundred feet or so away from it , yet overhung the place and cast a perpetual shadow there . I wondered then why Nature had no secret springs of feeling to thrill her and cause her to rend the rocks and cover such a den of iniquity as we all held the spot to be . But Nature was just as fair that ambrosial September day as if there was not a dissonance .