hich is even now for ever in my ears.
To me that day it was the voice of one alive; and it is the voice of one
alive to me now. I descended the sloping hill with my lounging,
weak-kneed gait, at which the creatures who called me master had so
often looked contemptuously askance. (I was often tired at that time.) I
descended, I say, until I reached the edge of the tree-fringed den, and
the burn was noisy in my ears. I could see it now, leaping here and
there out of its hiding-place--ivory foam among the dripping larches,
and the birches with their silver stems; ivory foam among the deep brown
and flaming orange of the bracken, and in that foam a voice
calling--calling me to come down into its hiding-place, presided over by
the mists--to come down into its hiding-place, away from men: away from
the living creatures whom I hated because I envied them, because they
were stronger than I, because they could do what I could not do, say
what I could not say. Gavin, Dr Wedderburn, my tenants, the smallest
farm boy, the grooms, the little leaping peasants--I hated, I hated them
all. And then I obeyed the voice of the ivory foam, and I went down into
the hiding-place of the burn.

It ran through strange and secret places where the soft mists hung in
wet wreaths. I seemed to be in another world when I was in its lair. On
the sharply rising banks stood the sentinel trees like shadows, some of
them with tortured and tormented shapes. As I turned and looked straight
up the hill of the burn's descending course, the mountain from which it
came closed in the prospect inexorably. A soft gloom hemmed us in--me
and the burn which talked to me. We two were out of the world which I
hated and longed to have at my feet. Yes, we were in another world, full
of murmuring and of restful unrest; and now that I was right down at the
water-side, the ivory face of my friend, the ivory lips that spoke to
me, the ivory heart that beat against my heart--so sick and so
weary--were varied and were changed. As thoughts streak a mind, the
clear amber of the pools among the rocks streaked the continuous foam
that marked the incessant leaps taken by the water towards the valley.
The silence of those pools was brilliant, like the pauses for
contemplation in a great career of action; and their silence spoke to
me, mingling mysteriously with the voice of the foam. The course of the
burn is broken up, and attended by rocks that have been modelled by the
action of t