water-fairies--if it were true, as the old Greeks and Romans thought,
that rivers were living things, with a Nymph who dwelt in each of them,
and was its goddess or its queen--then, if your ears were opened to hear
her, the Nymph of Itchen might say to you--

So child, you think that I do nothing but, as your sister says when she
sings Mr. Tennyson's beautiful song,

"I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles."

Yes. I do that: and I love, as the Nymphs loved of old, men who have
eyes to see my beauty, and ears to discern my song, and to fit their own
song to it, and tell how

"'I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling,

"'And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel
With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel,

"'And draw them all along, and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.'"

Yes. That is all true: but if that were all, I should not be let to flow
on for ever, in a world where Lady Why rules, and Madam How obeys. I
only exist (like everything else, from the sun in heaven to the gnat
which dances in his beam) on condition of working, whether we wish it or
not, whether we know it or not. I am not an idle stream, only fit to
chatter to those who bathe or fish in my waters, or even to give poets
beautiful fancies about me. You little guess the work I do. For I am
one of the daughters of Madam How, and, like her, work night and day, we
know not why, though Lady Why must know. So day by day, and night by
night, while you are sleeping (for I never sleep), I carry, delicate and
soft as I am, a burden which giants could not bear: and yet I am never
tired. Every drop of rain which the south-west wind brings from the West
Indian seas gives me fresh life and strength to bear my burden; and it
has need to do so; for every drop of rain lays a fresh burden on me.
Every root and weed which grows in every field; every dead leaf which
falls in the highwoods of many a parish, from the Grange and Woodmancote
round to Farleigh and Preston, and so to Brighton and the Alresford
downs;--ay, every atom of manure which the farmers put on the land--foul
enough then, but pure enough before it touches me--each of these, giving
off a tiny atom of what men cal