ettles and young weeds of
many kinds, seen from a railway carriage and touched with the railway
dust. There is cleaner grass by the Speke Monument, but this that grows by
the railway is out of town; it is of another kind; it is of the other
spring. Somewhere, past the suburbs, the London spring had its frontier,
and, this past, the sun and the sap dawned and rose with sudden authority,
and spring was real.

Knowing how intimate is the sense of smell, one might think that the
absence of the scent of the earth might account for all the deep
difference of London. But it is not so; for you know the real spring by
mere sight. Still, the lack of that fragrance is much. The earth is home,
and the scent of it is the scent of infancy and home. Childhood knows it
better than does the ploughman following the new furrow. Childhood has had
it so near, and has learned it once for all, and will never be deceived,
nor will the man who has had a childhood near living earth; he knows that
the springs are two. He knows, for he remembers that he knew, the spirit
of the place. That is an aura that lies near the ground. It is a warm
atmosphere that does not rise, but breathes by little garden plots in
corners; is the very spirit of rivulets and brooks; lurks amongst the
maiden-hair that covers the fresh waters of Mediterranean hillsides, and
amongst the gravel of old sunny garden terraces; is so caught in moss that
the air where moss grows seems to imprison it; and passes quick into the
nostrils of young children. All low-growing flowers--ground-ivy, and
things that are not so tall as grass--are entangled with the spirit of
place. Low box hedges are intricate with it, and with the spirit of
antiquity, because they are no higher than the heads of very little
children, whose hearts conceive antiquity and the genius of places. They
know the breath of the parks well. What children know--what they
knew--we have never forgotten. And yet all the differences which they
learned--the difference between the weak odour of soot and the gentle
odour of earth, and the difference between the click of the bit and the
sound of the bee--are not the real difference between the town spring and
the spring of the natural world. They are mere signs and proofs; the fact
lies deep and close; there are two springs.

[Illustration: WATERLOO BRIDGE.]

And yet, across all boundaries, across the frontier of the suburbs, what
is this strange scrap of the real May of