rations used in some
Watteau festival, moss-roses in loosened garlands. Elsewhere a corner
seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily; of a neat pink or
white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain, with housewifely
care; while, a little farther again, were others, pressed close together
in a floating garden-bed, as though pansies had flown out of a garden
like butterflies and were hovering with blue and burnished wings over
the transparent shadowiness of this watery border; this skiey border
also, for it set beneath the flowers a soil of a colour more precious,
more moving than their own; and both in the afternoon, when it sparkled
beneath the lilies in the kaleidoscope of a happiness silent, restless,
and alert, and towards evening, when it was filled like a distant heaven
with the roseate dreams of the setting sun, incessantly changing and
ever remaining in harmony, about the more permanent colour of the
flowers themselves, with the utmost profundity, evanescence, and
mystery--with a quiet suggestion of infinity; afternoon or evening, it
seemed to have set them flowering in the heart of the sky.

After leaving this park the Vivonne began to flow again more swiftly.
How often have I watched, and longed to imitate, when I should be free
to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay stretched
out on his back, his head down, in the bottom of his boat, letting it
drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky which slipped quietly
above him, shewing upon his features a foretaste of happiness and peace.

We would sit down among the irises at the water's edge. In the holiday
sky a lazy cloud streamed out to its full length. Now and then, crushed
by the burden of idleness, a carp would heave up out of the water, with
an anxious gasp. It was time for us to feed. Before starting homewards
we would sit for a long time there, eating fruit and bread and
chocolate, on the grass, over which came to our ears, horizontal, faint,
but solid still and metallic, the sound of the bells of Saint-Hilaire,
which had melted not at all in the atmosphere it was so well accustomed
to traverse, but, broken piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all
their sonorous strokes, throbbed as it brushed the flowers at our feet.

Sometimes, at the water's edge and embedded in trees, we would come upon
a house of the kind called 'pleasure houses,' isolated and lost, seeing
nothing of the world, save the river whic