‘Do you remember, Winnie,’ I murmured, ’when you so delighted me by exclaiming, “What a beautiful world it is!"?’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Winnie, ’and how I should love to paint its beauty.  The only people I really envy are painters.’

We were now at the famous spot where the triple echo is best heard, and we began to shout like two children in the direction of Llyn Ddu’r Arddu.  And then our talk naturally fell on Knockers’ Llyn and the echoes to be heard there.  She then took me to another famous sight on this side of Snowdon, the enormous stone, said to be five thousand tons in weight, called the Knockers’ Anvil.  While we lingered here Winnie gave me as many anecdotes and legends of this stone as would fill a little volume.  But suddenly she stopped.

‘Look!’ she said, pointing to the sunset.  ’I have seen that sight only once before.  I was with Sinfi.  She called it “the Dukkeripen of the Trushul."’

The sun was now on the point of sinking, and his radiance, falling on the cloud-pageantry of the zenith, fired the flakes and vapoury films floating and trailing above, turning them at first into a ruby-coloured mass, and then into an ocean of rosy fire.  A horizontal bar of cloud which, until the radiance of the sunset fell upon it, had been dull and dark and grey, as though a long slip from the slate quarries had been laid across the west, became for a moment a deep lavender colour, and then purple, and then red-gold.  But what Winnie was pointing at was a dazzling shaft of quivering fire where the sun had now sunk behind the horizon.  Shooting up from the cliffs where the sun had disappeared, this shaft intersected the bar of clouds and seemed to make an irregular cross of deep rose.

When Winnie turned her eyes again to mine I was astonished to see tears in them.  I asked her what they meant.  She said, ’While I was looking at that cross of rose and gold in the clouds it seemed to me that there came on the evening breeze the sound of a sob, and that it was Sinfi’s, my sister Sinfi’s; but of course by this time Snowdon stands between us and her.’

POSTSCRIPT

In every case where I have brought into this story facts connected with medical matters, I have been most cautious to avail myself of the authority of medical men.  I will give here the words of Mr. James Douglas upon this matter.  After stating the fact that the story was in part dictated to my dear friend Dr. Gordon Hake during a stay with him at Roehampton, he says:—­

Dr. Hake is mainly known as the ‘parable poet,’ but as a fact he was a physician of extraordinary talent who had practised first at Bury St. Edmunds and afterwards at Spring Gardens, London, until he partly retired to be private physician to the late Lady Ripon.  After her death he left practice altogether in order to devote himself to literature, for which he had very great equipments.  As Aylwin