long, slim branches quite down to the surface of the water, and in some
places forming an arch above the stream. A short distance from this
tangle, so abundantly sprinkled with its pale delicate roses, the water
was spanned by a small wooden bridge, which no person appeared to use,
but which had a use. It formed the one dry clear spot in the midst of
all that moist vegetation, and the birds that came from the wood to
drink and search for worms and small caterpillars first alighted on the
bridge. There they would rest a few moments, take a look round, then fly
to some favourite spot where succulent morsels had been picked up on
previous visits. Thrushes, blackbirds, sparrows, reed-buntings,
chaffinches, tits, wrens, with many other species, succeeded each other
all day long; for now they mostly had young to provide for, and it was
their busiest time.

The unsullied beauty and solitariness of this spot made me wish at first
that I was a boy once more, to climb and to swim, to revel in the
sunshine and flowers, to be nearer in spirit to the birds and dragon
flies and water-rats; then, that I could build a cabin and live there
all the summer long, forgetful of the world and its affairs, with no
human creature to keep me company, and no book to read, or with only one
slim volume, some Spanish poet, let me say Melendez, for
preference--only a small selection from his too voluminous writings; for
he, albeit an eighteenth-century singer, was perhaps the last of that
long, illustrious line of poets who sang as no others have sung of the
pure delight-fulness of a life with nature. Something of this charm is
undoubtedly due to the beauty of the language they wrote in and to the
free, airy grace of assonants. What a hard, artificial sound the rhyme
too often has: the clink that falls at regular intervals as of a
stone-breaker's hammer! In the freer kinds of Spanish poetry there are
numberless verses that make the smoothest lines and lyrics of our