Above Charlecote the Avon grows narrow for a space, and after you pass under Hampton Lucy bridge your boat is much entangled in river grass and much impeded by whirls and eddies of the shallowing stream. There is another mill at Hampton Lucy, and a little way beyond the village your further progress upward is stopped by a waterfall,--beyond which, however, and accessible by the usual expedient of dragging the boat over the land, a noble reach of the river is disclosed, stretching away toward Warwick, where the wonderful Castle, and sweet St. Mary's tower, and Leicester's hospital, and the cosy Warwick Arms await your coming,--with mouldering Kenilworth and majestic Stoneleigh Abbey reserved to lure you still further afield. But the scene around Hampton Lucy is not one to be quickly left. There the meadows are rich and green and fragrant. There the large trees give grateful shade and make sweet music in the summer wind. There, from the ruddy village, thin spires of blue smoke curl upward through the leaves and seem to tell of comfort and content beneath. At a little distance the gray tower of the noble church,--an edifice of peculiar and distinctive majesty, and one well worthy of the exceptional beauty enshrined within it,--rears itself among the elms. Close by the sleek and indolent cattle are couched upon the cool sod, looking at you with large, soft, lustrous, indifferent eyes. The waterfall sings on, with its low melancholy plaint, while sometimes the silver foam of it is caught up and whirled away by the breeze. The waves sparkle on the running stream, and the wildflowers, in gay myriads, glance and glimmer on the velvet shore. And so, as the sun is setting and the rooks begin to fly homeward, you breathe the fragrant air from Scarbank and look upon a veritable place that Shakespeare may have had in mind when he wrote his line of endless melody-- "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows."[41] CHAPTER XII RAMBLES IN ARDEN