Who, being free to make his choice, would not follow the course of the waters on his wanderings? The attraction which water exercises upon the normal man is natural and mystically sympathetic. Man is a child of water. Our bodies are nine-tenths water, and during a stage of our pre-natal development, we even have gills. As for myself, I gladly confess that the contemplation of water in every shape and form is for me the most immediate and poignant joy in nature—yes, I will even go so far as to say that true abstractedness, true self-forgetfulness, the real merging of my own circumscribed existence in the universal, is granted to me only when my eyes lose themselves in some great liquid mirror. Thus, in the face of the sleeping or the charging and crashing of the on-rushing sea, I am like to be transported into a condition of such profound and organic dreams, of such a remote absence from myself, that all sense of time is lost and tedium becomes a thing without meaning, since hour upon hour spent in such identification and communion melt away as though they were but minutes. But I also love to lean upon the rail of a bridge that crosses a brook, and remain fixed to it as with thongs, losing myself in the vision of the flowing, streaming and whirling element—quite immune to the fear or impatience with which I ought to be filled in view of that other streaming and flowing that goes on about me—the swift, fluid flight of time. Such love of the water, and all that water means, renders the tight little territory which I inhabit the more important and precious to me in that it is surrounded on both sides by water. The local brook is of the simple and faithful species. There is nothing very remarkable about it—its character is based upon friendly averages. It is of a naiveté as clear as glass, without subtlety or deception, without an attempt to simulate depth by means of murkiness. It is shallow and dear and quite innocently reveals the fact that its bottom harbours castaway tin pots and the carcass of a lace-boot in a coat of green slime. It is, however, deep enough to serve as a habitation to pretty, silvery-gray and extremely nimble little fish, which, I presume, are minnows and which dart away in wide zigzag lines at our approach. My brook widens here and there into ponds with fine willows along the edges. One of these willows I always regard lovingly as I pass by. It grows—I had almost said she grows—close to the bluff, and thus at some distance from the water. But it stretches one of its boughs longingly towards the brook and has really succeeded in reaching the flowing water with the silvery foliage that plumes the tip of this bough. There it stands, with fay-like fingers wet in the stream and draws pleasure from the contact.