ubtle-paced counsel in distress."

The soft cadences and turns in my lady Katrina's speech draw me into
the humour of her gentle judgments of men and things. The touches of
quaintness in Angelica's dress, her folded kerchief and smooth-parted
hair, seem to partake of herself, and enhance my admiration for the
sweet order of her thoughts and her old-fashioned ideals of love and
duty. Even so the stream and its channel are one life, and I cannot
think of the swift, brown flood of the Batiscan without its shadowing
primeval forests, or the crystalline current of the Boquet without
its beds of pebbles and golden sand and grassy banks embroidered with
flowers.

Every country--or at least every country that is fit for habitation--has
its own rivers; and every river has its own quality; and it is the
part of wisdom to know and love as many as you can, seeing each in the
fairest possible light, and receiving from each the best that it has
to give. The torrents of Norway leap down from their mountain home with
plentiful cataracts, and run brief but glorious races to the sea.
The streams of England move smoothly through green fields and beside
ancient, sleepy towns. The Scotch rivers brawl through the open moorland
and flash along steep Highland glens. The rivers of the Alps are born in
icy caves, from which they issue forth with furious, turbid waters; but
when their anger has been forgotten in the slumber of some blue lake,
they flow down more softly to see the vineyards of France and Italy,
the gray castles of Germany, the verdant meadows of Holland. The mighty
rivers of the West roll their yellow floods through broad valleys,
or plunge down dark canyons. The rivers of the South creep under dim
arboreal archways hung with banners of waving moss. The Delaware and
the Hudson and the Connecticut are the children of the Catskills and the
Adirondacks and the White Mountains, cradled among the forests of spruce
and hemlock, playing through a wild woodland youth, gathering strength
from numberless tributaries to bear their great burdens of lumber
and turn the wheels of many mills, issuing from the hills to water
a thousand farms, and descending at last, beside new cities, to the
ancient sea.

Every river that flows is good, and has something worthy to be loved.
But those that we love most are always the ones that we have known
best,--the stream that ran before our father's door, the current on
which we ventured our first boat or c