an endless delight.

It is strange how some individual broidery or figure upon Nature's
garment will delight a boy long before he has ever looked Nature in
the face, or begun to love herself. But Robert was soon to become dimly
conscious of a life within these things--a life not the less real that
its operations on his mind had been long unrecognized.

On the grassy bank of the gently-flowing river, at the other edge of
whose level the little canal squabbled along, and on the grassy brae
which rose immediately from the canal, were stretched, close beside each
other, with scarce a stripe of green betwixt, the long white webs of
linen, fastened down to the soft mossy ground with wooden pegs, whose
tops were twisted into their edges. Strangely would they billow in the
wind sometimes, like sea-waves, frozen and enchanted flat, seeking to
rise and wallow in the wind with conscious depth and whelming mass. But
generally they lay supine, saturated with light and its cleansing power.
Falconer's jubilation in the white and green of a little boat, as we
lay, one bright morning, on the banks of the Thames between Richmond
and Twickenham, led to such a description of the bleachfield that I can
write about it as if I had known it myself.

One Saturday afternoon in the end of July, when the westering sun was
hotter than at midday, he went down to the lower end of the field, where
the river was confined by a dam, and plunged from the bank into deep
water. After a swim of half-an-hour, he ascended the higher part of the
field, and lay down upon a broad web to bask in the sun. In his ears
was the hush rather than rush of the water over the dam, the occasional
murmur of a belt of trees that skirted the border of the field, and
the dull continuous sound of the beatles at their work below, like a
persistent growl of thunder on the horizon.

Had Robert possessed a copy of Robinson Crusoe, or had his grandmother
not cast The Lady of the Lake, mistaking it for an idol, if not to the
moles and the bats, yet to the mice and the black-beetles, he might
have been lying reading it, blind and deaf to the face and the voice
of Nature, and years might have passed before a response awoke in
his heart. It is good that children of faculty, as distinguished from
capacity, should not have too many books to read, or too much of early
lessoning. The increase of examinations in our country will increase
its capacity and diminish its faculty. We shall have