nuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation.

VII

THE MANSE

I have named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that dirty
Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it again; and the
choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain
water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for
the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and
darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold;
and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill
just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black
heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many
other mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was
when I was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife,
have been busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it
must be on many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as the
point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale may be
exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may seem to climb
to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am standing, seem as
low as Styx. And I must choose the season also, so that the valley may
be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the songs of birds;--and the
year of grace, so that when I turn to leave the river-side I may find
the old manse and its inhabitants unchanged.

It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into provinces
by a great hedge of beech, and overlooked by the church and the terrace
of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, and after nightfall
"spunkies" might be seen to dance, at least by children; flower-plots
lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the great yew making elsewhere a
pleasing horror of shade; the smell of water rising from all round, with
an added tang of paper-mills; the sound of water everywhere, and the
sound of mills--the wheel and the dam singing their alternate strain;
the birds on every bush and from every corner of the overhanging woods
pealing out their notes until the air throbbed with them; and in the
midst of this, the manse. I see it, by the standard of my childish
stature, as a great and roomy house. In truth, it was not so large as I
supposed, nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is
difficult to suppose that it was healthful. Yet a large family of