bbling awhile in
the well--what boy has ever passed a bit of water without messing in
it?--I scrambled through the hedge, shunning the hornet-haunted side,
and struck into the silence of the copse.

If the lane had been deserted, this was loneliness become personal. Here
mystery lurked and peeped; here brambles caught and held you with a
purpose of their own; here saplings whipped your face with human spite.
The copse, too, proved vaster in extent, more direfully drawn out, than
one would ever have guessed from its frontage on the lane: and I was
really glad when at last the wood opened and sloped down to a streamlet
brawling forth into the sunlight. By this cheery companion I wandered
along, conscious of little but that Nature, in providing store of
water-rats, had thoughtfully furnished provender of right-sized stones.
Rapids, also, there were, telling of canoes and portages--crinkling bays
and inlets--caves for pirates and hidden treasures--the wise Dame had
forgotten nothing--till at last, after what lapse of time I know not,
my further course, though not the stream's, was barred by some six feet
of stout wire netting, stretched from side to side just where a thick
hedge, arching till it touched, forbade all further view.

The excitement of the thing was becoming thrilling. A Black Flag must
surely be fluttering close by? Here was most plainly a malignant
contrivance of the Pirates, designed to baffle our gun-boats when we
dashed up-stream to shell them from their lair! A gun-boat, indeed,
might well have hesitated, so stout was the netting, so close the hedge.
But I spied where a rabbit was wont to pass, close down by the water's
edge; where a rabbit could go a boy could follow, howbeit stomach-wise
and with one leg in the stream; so the passage was achieved, and I stood
inside, safe but breathless at the sight.

Gone was the brambled waste, gone the flickering tangle of woodland.
Instead, terrace after terrace of shaven sward, stone-edged,
urn-cornered, stepped delicately down to where the stream, now tamed
and educated, passed from one to another marble basin, in which on
occasion gleams of red hinted at gold-fish poised among the spreading
water-lilies. The scene lay silent and slumbrous in the brooding
noon-day sun: the drowsing peacock squatted humped on the lawn, no fish
leaped in the pools, no bird declared himself from the trim secluding
hedges. Self-confessed it was here, then, at last, the Garden of Sle