sunset. You cannot have seen a sunset for ever so long."

No--that was true. I let John do as he would with me--he who brought
into my pale life the only brightness it had ever known.

Ere long we stood on the top of the steep mound. I know not if it be
a natural hill, or one of those old Roman or British remains,
plentiful enough hereabouts, but it was always called the Mythe.
Close below it, at the foot of a precipitous slope, ran the Severn,
there broad and deep enough, gradually growing broader and deeper as
it flowed on, through a wide plain of level country, towards the line
of hills that bounded the horizon. Severn looked beautiful here;
neither grand nor striking, but certainly beautiful; a calm,
gracious, generous river, bearing strength in its tide and plenty in
its bosom, rolling on through the land slowly and surely, like a good
man's life, and fertilising wherever it flows.

"Do you like Severn still, John?"

"I love it."

I wondered if his thoughts had been anything like mine.

"What is that?" he cried, suddenly, pointing to a new sight, which
even I had not often seen on our river. It was a mass of water,
three or four feet high, which came surging along the midstream,
upright as a wall.

"It is the eger; I've often seen it on Severn, where the swift
seaward current meets the spring-tide. Look what a crest of foam it