familiar with the district for miles round Moleswich, and he knew
that a footpath through the fields at the right would lead him, in less
than an hour, to the side of the tributary brook on which Cromwell Lodge
was placed, opposite the wooden bridge which conducted to Grasmere and
Moleswich.

To one who loves the romance of history, English history, the whole
course of the Thames is full of charm. Ah! could I go back to the days
in which younger generations than that of Kenelm Chillingly were unborn,
when every wave of the Rhine spoke of history and romance to me, what
fairies should meet on thy banks, O thou our own Father Thames! Perhaps
some day a German pilgrim may repay tenfold to thee the tribute rendered
by the English kinsman to the Father Rhine.

Listening to the whispers of the reeds, Kenelm Chillingly felt the
haunting influence of the legendary stream. Many a poetic incident or
tradition in antique chronicle, many a votive rhyme in song, dear to
forefathers whose very names have become a poetry to us, thronged dimly
and confusedly back to his memory, which had little cared to retain such
graceful trinkets in the treasure-house of love. But everything that,
from childhood upward, connects itself with romance, revives with yet
fresher bloom in the memories of him who loves.

And to this man, through the first perilous season of youth, so
abnormally safe from youth's most wonted peril,--to this would-be
pupil of realism, this learned adept in the schools of a Welby or a
Mivers,--to this man, love came at last as with the fatal powers of
the fabled Cytherea; and with that love all the realisms of life became
ideals, all the stern lines of our commonplace destinies undulated into
curves of beauty, all the trite sounds of our every-day life attuned
into delicacies of song. How full of sanguine yet dreamy bliss was his
heart--and seemed his future--in the gentle breeze and the softened glow
of that summer eve! He should see Lily the next morn, and his lips were
now free to say all that they had as yet suppressed.

Suddenly he was roused from the half-awake, half-asleep happiness that
belongs to the moments in which we transport ourselves into Elysium, by
the carol of a voice more loudly joyous than that of his own heart--

"Singing, singing,
Lustily singing,
Down the road, with his dogs before,
Came the Ritter of Nierestein."

Kenelm turned his head so quickly that he frightened Max, who