rustic-timbered bridge to look at
a little stream that ran beneath the road, winding down through a rough
pasture-field, with many thorn-thickets. The water, lapsing slowly
through withered flags, had the pure, gem-like quality of the winter
stream; in summer it will become dim and turbid with infusorial life,
but now it is like a pale jewel. How strange, I thought, to think of
this liquid gaseous juice, which we call water, trickling in the cracks
of the earth! And just as the fish that live in it think of it as
their world, and have little cognisance of what happens in the acid,
unsubstantial air above, except the occasional terror of the dim,
looming forms which come past, making the soft banks quiver and stir,
so it may be with us; there may be a great mysterious world outside of
us, of which we sometimes see the dark manifestations, and yet of the
conditions of which we are wholly unaware.

And now it grew dark; the horizon began to redden and smoulder; the
stream gleamed like a wan thread among the distant fields. It was time
to hurry home, to dip in the busy tide of life again. Where was my sad
mood gone? The clear air seemed to have blown through my mind, hands
had been waved to me from leafless woods, quiet voices of field and
stream had whispered me their secrets; "We would tell, if we could,"
they seemed to say. And I, listening, had learnt patience, too--for
awhile.

IV

The Flower

I have made friends with a new flower. If it had a simple and
wholesome English name, I would like to know it, though I do not care
to know what ugly and clumsy title the botany books may give it; but it
lives in my mind, a perfect and complete memory of brightness and
beauty, and, as I have said, a friend.

It was in a steep sea-cove that I saw it. Round a small circular basin
of blue sea ran up gigantic cliffs, grey limestone bluffs; here and
there, where they were precipitous, slanted the monstrous wavy lines of
distorted strata, thrust up, God alone knows how many ages ago, by some
sharp and horrible shiver of the boiling earth. Little waves broke on
the pebbly beach at our feet, and all the air was full of pleasant
sharp briny savours. A few boats were drawn up on the shingle;
lobster-pots, nets, strings of cork, spars, oars, lay in pleasant
confusion, by the sandy road that led up to the tiny hamlet above. We
had travelled far that day and were comfortably weary; we found a
sloping ledge of turf upo