but down the
stream, turning the other way, intensely brilliant points of light
appear and disappear. Behind a boat rowed against the current two
widening lines of wavelets, in the shape of an elongated V, stretch
apart and glitter, and every dip of the oars and the slippery oar-blades
themselves, as they rise out of the water, reflect the sunshine. The
boat appears but to touch the surface, instead of sinking into it, for
the water is transparent, and the eye can see underneath the keel.

Here, by some decaying piles, a deep eddy whirls slowly round and round;
they stand apart from the shore, for the eddy has cleared away the earth
around them. Now, walking behind the waves that roll away from you, dark
shadowy spots fluctuate to and fro in the trough of the water. Before a
glance can define its shape the shadow elongates itself from a spot to
an oval, the oval melts into another oval, and reappears afar off. When,
too, in flood time, the hurrying current seems to respond more
sensitively to the shape of the shallows and the banks beneath, there
boils up from below a ceaseless succession of irregular circles as if
the water there expanded from a centre, marking the verge of its outflow
with bubbles and raised lines upon the surface.

By the side float tiny whirlpools, some rotating this way and some that,
sucking down and boring tubes into the stream. Longer lines wander past,
and as they go, curve round, till when about to make a spiral they
lengthen out and drift, and thus, perpetually coiling and uncoiling,
glide with the current. They somewhat resemble the conventional curved
strokes which, upon an Assyrian bas-relief, indicate water.

Under the spring sunshine, the idle stream flows easily onward, yet
every part of the apparently even surface varies; and so, too, in a
larger way, the aspects of the succeeding reaches change. Upon one broad
bend the tints are green, for the river moves softly in a hollow, with
its back, as it were, to the wind.

The green lawn sloping to the shore, and the dark cedar's storeys of
flattened foliage, tier above tier; the green osiers of two eyots: the
light-leaved aspen; the tall elms, fresh and green; and the green
hawthorn bushes give their colour to the water, smooth as if polished,
in which they are reflected. A white swan floats in the still narrow
channel between the eyots, and there is a punt painted green moored in a
little inlet by the lawn, and scarce visible under droo