n vain. That
morning the very scent of breakfast being prepared came to my nostrils
like the smoke of a sacrifice in my honour; the shape and hue of the
flowers were full of gracious mystery; the green pasture seemed a
place where a middle-aged man might almost venture to dance. The sharp
chirping of the birds in the shrubbery seemed a concert arranged for my
ear. We were soon astir. Like Wordsworth we said that this one day
we would give to idleness, though the profane might ask to what that
leisurely poet consecrated the rest of his days.

We found ourselves deposited, by a brisk train--the very stoker seemed
to be engaged in the joyful conspiracy--at the little town of St. Ives.
I should like to expatiate upon the charms of St. Ives, its clear,
broad, rush-fringed river, its quaint brick houses, with their little
wharf-gardens, where the trailing nasturtium mirrors itself in the slow
flood, its embayed bridge, with the ancient chapel buttressed over the
stream--but I must hold my hand; I must not linger over the beauties of
the City of Destruction, which I have every reason to believe was a very
picturesque place, when our hearts were set on pilgrimage. Suffice it
to say that we walked along a pretty riverside causeway, under enlacing
limes, past the fine church, under the hanging woods of Houghton
Hill--and here we found a mill, a big, timbered place, with a tiled
roof, odd galleries and projecting pent-houses, all pleasantly dusted
with flour, where a great wheel turned dripping in a fern-clad cavern
of its own, with the scent of the weedy river-water blown back from
the plunging leat. Oh, the joyful place of streams! River and leat and
back-water here ran clear among willow-clad islands, all fringed deep
with meadow-sweet and comfrey and butterbur and melilot. The sun shone
overhead among big, white, racing clouds; the fish poised in mysterious
pools among trailing water-weeds; and there was soon no room in my heart
for anything but the joy of earth and the beauty of it. What did the
weary days before and behind matter? What did casuistry and determinism
and fate and the purpose of life concern us then, my friend and me? As
little as they concerned the gnats that danced so busily in the golden
light, at the corner where the alder dipped her red rootlets to drink
the brimming stream.

There we chartered a boat, and all that hot forenoon rowed lazily on,
the oars grunting and dripping, the rudder clicking softly th