CHAPTER XII Test and Itchen--Vegetation--Riverside villages--The cottage by the river--Itchen valley--Blossoming limes--Bird visitors--Goldfinch--Cirl bunting--Song--Plumage--Three common river birds--Coots--Moor-hen and nest--Little grebes' struggles--Male grebe's devotion--Parent coot's wisdom--A more or less happy family--Dogged little grebes--Grebes training their young--Fishing birds and fascination. There are no more refreshing places in Hampshire, one might almost say in England, than the green level valleys of the Test and Itchen that wind, alternately widening and narrowing, through the downland country to Southampton Water. Twin rivers they may be called, flowing at no great distance apart through the same kind of country, and closely alike in their general features: land and water intermixed--greenest water-meadows and crystal currents that divide and subdivide and join again, and again separate, forming many a miniature island and long slip of wet meadow with streams on either side. At all times refreshing to the sight and pleasant to dwell by, they are best When it is summer and the green is deep. Greens of darkest bulrushes, tipped with bright brown panicles, growing in masses where the water is wide and shallowest; of grey-green graceful reeds and of tallest reed-mace with dark velvety brown {243} spikes; behind them all, bushes and trees--silvery-leafed willow and poplar, and dark alder, and old thorns and brambles in tangled masses; and always in the foreground lighter and brighter sedges, glaucous green flags, mixed with great hemp agrimony, with flesh-coloured, white-powdered flowers, and big-leafed comfrey, and scores of other water and moisture-loving plants. Through this vegetation, this infinite variety of refreshing greens and graceful forms, flow the rapid rivers, crystal-clear and cold from the white chalk, a most beautiful water, with floating water-grass in it--the fascinating _Poa fluviatilis_ which, rooted in the pebbly bed, looks like green loosened wind-blown hair swaying and trembling in the ever-crinkled, swift current. [Sidenote: Test and Itchen]