The delight I know, but I cannot wholly agree with the explanation. A couple of months before this visit to Selborne, on 25th May, on passing some small grass-fields, enclosed in high, untrimmed hedges, on the border of a pine wood near Hythe, by Southampton Water, I all at once became conscious of a sound, which indeed had been for some considerable time in my ears, increasing in volume as I went on until it forced my attention to it. When I listened, I found myself in a place where field-crickets were in extraordinary abundance; there must have been many hundreds within hearing distance, and their delicate shrilling came from the grass and hedges all round me. It was as if all the field-crickets in the county had congregated and were holding a grand musical festival at that spot. A dozen or twenty house-crickets in a kitchen would have made more noise; this was not loud, nor could it properly be described as a noise; it was more like a subtle music without rise or fall or change; or like a continuous, diffused, silvery-bright, musical hum, which surrounded one like an atmosphere, and at the same time pervaded and trembled through one like a vibration. It was certainly very delightful, and the feeling in this instance was not due to {171} association, but, I think, to the intrinsic beauty of the sound itself. [Sidenote: Wild flowers] The Selborne stream, or Bourne, with its meadows and tangled copses on either side, was my favourite noonday haunt. The volume of water does not greatly diminish during the summer months, but in many places the bed of the stream was quite grown over with aquatic plants, topped with figwort, huge water-agrimony, with its masses of powdery, flesh-coloured blooms, creamy meadow-sweet, and rose-purple loosestrife, and willow-herb with its appetising odour of codlins and cream. The wild musk, or monkey-flower, a Hampshire plant about which there will be much to say in another chapter, was also common. At one spot a mass of it grew at the foot of a high bank on the water's edge; from the top of the bank long branches of briar-rose trailed down, and the rich, pure yellow mimulus blossoms and ivory-white roses of the briar were seen together. An even lovelier effect was produced at another spot by the mingling of the yellow flowers with the large turquoise-blue water forget-me-nots.