ges is the brook
below the waterfall at A---- in the Cotswolds. On your left as you look
up stream from the bridge of the "pill," a moss-grown gravel path runs
alongside the water under a hanging wood of leafy elms and
smooth-trunked beech trees, where the ringdoves coo all day. A tangled
hedge filled with tall timber trees runs up the right-hand bank. Here
the great convolvulus, queen of wild flowers, twists her bines among the
hedge; the bell-shaped flowers are conspicuous everywhere, large and
lily-white as the arum, so luxuriant is the growth of wild flowers by
the brook-side.

A silver stream is the Coln hereabouts, the abode of fairies and fawns,
and nymphs and dryads. But when the afternoon sun shines upon it, it
becomes a stream of diamonds set in banks of emeralds, with an arched
and groined roof of jasper, carved with foliations of graceful ash and
willow, and over all a sky of sapphire sprinkled with clouds of pearl
and opal. Later on towards evening there will be floods of golden light
on the grass and on the beech trees up the eastern slope of the valley
and on the bare red earth under the trees, red with fifty years' beech
nuts. And later still, when the distant hills are dyed as if with
archil, the sapphire sky will be striped with bars of gold and dotted
with coals of fire; rubies and garnets, sardonyx and chrysolite will all
be there, and the bluish green of beryl, the western sky as varied as
felspar and changing colour as quickly as the chameleon. And as the day
declines the last beams of the setting sun will find their way through
the tracery of foliage that overhangs the brook, and the waters will be
tinged with a rosy glow, even as in some ancestral hall or Gothic
cathedral the sun at eventide pours through the blazoned windows and
floods the interior with rays of soft, mysterious, coloured light.

I have been trying to describe one of the loveliest bits of miniature
scenery on earth; yet how commonplace it all reads! Not a thousandth
part of the beauty of this spot at sunset is here set down, yet little
more can be said. How bitter to think that the true beauty of the trees,
the path by the brook, and the sunlight on the water cannot be passed on
for others to enjoy, cannot be stamped on paper, but must be seen to be
realised! Truly, as Richard Jefferies says somewhere, there is a layer
of thought in the human brain for which there are no words in any
language. We cannot express a thousandth part