I have a love for the out-of-the-way places of the earth when they
bristle all over with the quaint and the old and the odd, and are mouldy
with the picturesque. But here is an in-the-way place, all sunshine and
shimmer, with never a fringe of mould upon it, and yet you lose your
heart at a glance. It is as charming in its boat life as an old Holland
canal; it is as delightful in its shore life as the Seine; and it is as
picturesque and entrancing in its sylvan beauty as the most exquisite of
English streams.

The thousands of workaday souls who pass this spot daily in their whirl
out and in the great city may catch all these glimpses of shade and
sunlight over the edges of their journals, and any one of them living
near the city's centre, with a stout pair of legs in his knickerbockers
and the breath of the morning in his heart, can reach it afoot any day
before breakfast; and yet not one in a hundred knows that this ideal
nook exists.

Even this small percentage would be apt to tell of the delights of
Devonshire and of the charm of the upper Thames, with its tall rushes
and low-thatched houses and quaint bridges, as if the picturesque ended
there; forgetting that right here at home there wanders many a stream
with its breast all silver that the trees courtesy to as it sings
through meadows waist-high in lush grass,--as exquisite a picture as can
be found this beautiful land over.

So, this being an old tramping-ground of mine, I have left the station
with its noise and dust behind me this lovely morning in June, have
stopped long enough to twist a bunch of sweet peas through the garden
fence, and am standing on the bank waiting for some sign of life at
Madame Laguerre's. I discover that there is no boat on my side of the