where beyond there were flat meadows, Roper's meadows.
The Ravensbrook went meandering across the middle of these, now between
steep banks, and now with wide shallows at the bends where the cattle
waded and drank. Yellow and purple loose-strife and ordinary rushes grew
in clumps along the bank, and now and then a willow. On rare occasions
of rapture one might see a rat cleaning his whiskers at the water's
edge. The deep places were rich with tangled weeds, and in them fishes
lurked--to me they were big fishes--water-boatmen and water-beetles
traversed the calm surface of these still deeps; in one pool were yellow
lilies and water-soldiers, and in the shoaly places hovering fleets of
small fry basked in the sunshine--to vanish in a flash at one's shadow.
In one place, too, were Rapids, where the stream woke with a start from
a dreamless brooding into foaming panic and babbled and hastened. Well
do I remember that half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades
have their reference to it for me. And after I was eleven, and before we
left Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed.

The volume of its water decreased abruptly--I suppose the new drainage
works that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first acquainted
with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do with
that--until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained. That at first
did not strike me as a misfortune. An adventurous small boy might walk
dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible. But hard upon that came the
pegs, the planks and carts and devastation. Roper's meadows, being no
longer in fear of floods, were now to be slashed out into parallelograms
of untidy road, and built upon with rows of working-class cottages. The
roads came,--horribly; the houses followed. They seemed to rise in
the night. People moved into them as soon as the roofs were on, mostly
workmen and their young wives, and already in a year some of these raw
houses stood empty again from defaulting tenants, with windows broken
and wood-work warping and rotting. The Ravensbrook became a dump for
old iron, rusty cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a river
only when unusual rains filled it for a day or so with an inky flood of
surface water....

That indeed was my most striking perception in the growth of Bromstead.
The Ravensbrook had been important to my imaginative life; that way
had always been my first choice in all my walks with my mother, and its