noon
A solitary figure passed over the great waste . He took his way northward and moved across Scorhill , leaving Wattern Tor to the left . Beneath its ragged ridges , in a vast granite amphitheatre , twinkled the cool birth-springs of the little Wallabrook , and the water here looked leaden under shade , here sparkled with silver at the margin of a cloud shadow , here shone golden bright amid the dancing heads of the cotton-grass under unclouded sunlight . The mist wreaths had wholly departed before noon , and only a few vast mountains of summer gold moved lazily along the upper chambers of the air . A huge and solitary shadow overtook the man and spread itself directly about him , then swept onwards ; infinite silence encompassed him ; once from a distant hillside a voice cried to him , where women and children moved like drab specks and gathered the ripe whortleberries that now wove purple patterns into the fabric of the Moor ; but he heeded not the cry ; and other sound there was none save the occasional and mournful note of some lonely yellowhammer perched upon a whin . Into the prevalent olive-brown of the heath there had now stolen an indication of a magic change at hand , for into the sober monotone crept a gauzy shadow , a tremor of wakening flower-life , half pearl , half palest pink , yet more than either . Upon the immediate foreground it rippled into defined points of blossom , which already twinkled through all the dull foliage ; in the middle distance it faded ; afar off it trembled as a palpable haze of light under the impalpable reeling of the summer air .