Whether they were fed by secret springs I know not; or whether they communicated by sluices or side-drains with the neighboring Thames; I never could discover any current or motion in their still, glassy waters, though I have wandered by their banks a hundred times, watching the red-finned roach and silvery dace pursue each other among the shadowy lily leaves, now startling a fat yellow frog from the marge, and following him as he dived through the limpid blackness to the very bottom, now starting in my own turn, as a big water-rat would swim from side to side, and vanish in some hole of the marly bank, and now endeavoring to catch the great azure-bodied, gauze-winged dragon-flies, as they shot to and fro on their poised wings, pursuing kites of the insect race, some of the smaller ephemera. It was those quiet, lucid waters, coupled with the exceeding shadiness of the trees, and its very unusual solitude--I have walked it, I suppose, from end to end at least a hundred times, and I never remember to have met so much even as a peasant returning from his daily labor, or a country maiden tripping to the neighboring town--that gave its character, and I will add, its charm to this half pastoral, half sylvan lane. For nearly three miles it ran in one direction, although, as I have said, with many devious turns, and seemingly unnecessary angles, and through that length it did not pass within the sound of one farm-yard, or the sight of one cottage chimney. But to make up for this, of which it was, indeed, a consequence, the nightingales were so bold and familiar that they might be heard all day long filling the air with their delicious melodies, not waiting, as in more frequented spots, the approach of night, whose dull ear to charm with amorous ravishment; nay, I have seen them perched in full view on the branches, gazing about them fearless with their full black eyes, and swelling their emulous throats in full view of the spectator. Three miles passed, the lane takes a sudden turn to the northward, having previously run, for the most part, east and west; and here, in the inner angle, jutting out suddenly from a dense thicket of hawthorns and hazels, an old octagonal summer-house, with a roof shaped like an extinguisher, projects into the ditch, which here expands into a little pool, some ten or twelve yards over in every direction, and perhaps deeper than at any other point of its course.