The novelist's imagination comes to the fore in his description of a fire: a vivid account of the burning of a great mill, a conflagration so vast that the clouds overhead were reddened as in a winter sunset, when the light falls lurid and tulip, and daffodil in the same monastic and uniform tint. The magic of spring is a work of great variety, coloured by Canon Sheehan's keen perception of nature, his love of man, and his awareness of God .