noon
Just at this time a spell of fine weather , very bright and serene , had been brooding over Lisconnel . It was the early spring of autumn , when leaves and berries here and there were taking a blossom-like vividness ; the frost-touched brier-sprays seemed to have found and dipped in the same red that had dyed the young buds and shoots of April . The air was so still that the seeded dandelions stood day after day with their fairy globes unbereft of a single downy dart , like little puffs of vapour among the grasses . A soft mist rounded off all the bogland , holding in a drowse the sunbeams that steeped it , and letting them waken to their full golden glory at the very heart of noon . But one morning the haze began to thicken and darken on the horizon , as if wafts of murky smoke were blown through it , and towards evening massy shapes of black clouds came slowly lifting themselves up , some with outlines curved like bosky clumps of wood , some ruggedly ledged and angled like a drift of begrimed icebergs . By sunset the far west was all a sullen gloom veined with lurid , tawny streaks , and mottled with deeper stains . Old Peter Sheridan , who is reputed to have `` a great eye for the weather , '' turned it forebodingly upon the prospect , and said the sky was `` the moral for all the world of the back of an ould brindled bull , and he 'd never known any good come of that manner of apparance . ''