glistening and gyrating on the white foam of the Kodor like a
quantity of mercurial salmon fry. And as I sat on some rocks
overlooking the river there occurred to me the thought that, as
likely as not, the cause of the gulls' and cormorants' fretful
cries where the surf lay moaning behind a belt of trees to the
right was that, like myself, they kept mistaking the leaves for
fish, and as often finding themselves disappointed.

Over my head hung chestnut trees decked with gold; at my feet
lay a mass of chestnut leaves which resembled the amputated
palms of human hands; on the opposite bank, where there waved,
tanglewise, the stripped branches of a hornbeam, an
orange-tinted woodpecker was darting to and fro, as though
caught in the mesh of foliage, and, in company with a troupe of
nimble titmice and blue tree-creepers (visitors from the
far-distant North), tapping the bark of the stem with a black
beak, and hunting for insects.

To the left, the tops of the mountains hung fringed with dense,
fleecy clouds of the kind which presages rain; and these clouds
were sending their shadows gliding over slopes green and
overgrown with boxwood and that peculiar species of hollow
beech-stump which once came near to effecting the downfall of
Pompey's host, through depriving his iron-built legions of the
use of their legs as they revelled in the intoxicating sweetness
of the " mead " or honey which wild bees make from the blossoms
of the laurel and the azalea, and travellers still
gather from those hollow stems to knead into lavashi or thin
cakes of millet flour.