rare occasions of rapture one mightsee a rat cleaning his whiskers

at the water's edge. The deep places were rich with tangled weeds,

and in them fishes lurked-to me they were big fishes-water-boatmen

and water-beetles traversed the calm surface of these still deeps;

in one pool were yellow lilies and water-soldiers, and in the shoaly

places hovering fleets of small fry basked in the sunshine-to

vanish in a flash at one's shadow. In one place, too, were Rapids,

where the streamwoke with a start from a dreamless brooding into

foaming panic and babbled and hastened. Well do Iremember that

half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades have their

reference to it for me. And after I was eleven, and before we left

Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed.

The volume of its water decreased abruptly-I suppose the new

drainage works that linked us up with Beckington, and made me first

acquainted with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do

with that-until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained. That at

first did not strike me as a misfortune. An adventurous small boy

might walk dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible. But hard upon

that came the pegs, the planks and carts and devastation. Roper's

meadows,being no longer infear of floods, were now to be slashed

out into parallelograms of untidy road, and built upon with rows of

working-class cottages. The roads came,-horribly; the houses

followed. They seemed to rise in the night. People moved into them

as soon as the roofs were on, mostly workmen and their young wives,

and already in a year some of these raw houses stood empty again

from defaulting tenants, with windows broken and wood-work warping

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