But was I a gloomy and distempered man, if, upon such a morn as
that, I stood on the little bridge across a certain brook, and
watched the water run, with something of a sigh? Or if, when the
schoolboy beside me lamented that the floods would surely be out,
and his day's fishing spoiled, I said to him--"Ah, my boy, that is
a little matter. Look at what you are seeing now, and understand
what barbarism and waste mean. Look at all that beautiful water
which God has sent us hither off the Atlantic, without trouble or
expense to us. Thousands, and tens of thousands, of gallons will
run under this bridge to-day; and what shall we do with it?
Nothing. And yet: think only of the mills which that water would
have turned. Think how it might have kept up health and
cleanliness in poor creatures packed away in the back streets of
the nearest town, or even in London itself. Think even how
country folks, in many parts of England, in three months' time,
may be crying out for rain, and afraid of short crops, and fever,
and scarlatina, and cattle-plague, for want of the very water
which we are now letting run back, wasted, into the sea from
whence it came. And yet we call ourselves a civilised people."

It is not wise, I know, to preach to boys. And yet, sometimes, a
man must speak his heart; even, like Midas's slave, to the reeds
by the river side. And I had so often, fishing up and down full
many a stream, whispered my story to those same river-reeds; and
told them that my Lord the Sovereign Demos had, like old Midas,
asses' ears in spite of all his gold, that I thought I might for
once tell it the boy likewise, in hope that he might help his
generation to mend that which my own generation does not seem like