Nor let it be said that the difference is superficial. That is precisely untrue; it is the likeness that is superficial, and the difference essential. The London spring is a brilliant image of the real spring. It is fresh when the real April is fresh; and when it grows dim you could match it with specimens from the country wayside. Nay, soot and smoke themselves cannot disguise the real spring growth and make it look like the London. That can easily be proved. After two weeks in which you are unconvinced of May by the green and dazzling parks, you will get the very thrill of May from a square yard of very young nettles and young weeds of many kinds, seen from a railway carriage and touched with the railway dust. There is cleaner grass by the Speke Monument, but this that grows by the railway is out of town; it is of another kind; it is of the other spring. Somewhere, past the suburbs, the London spring had its frontier, and, this past, the sun and the sap dawned and rose with sudden authority, and spring was real. Knowing how intimate is the sense of smell, one might think that the absence of the scent of the earth might account for all the deep difference of London. But it is not so; for you know the real spring by mere sight. Still, the lack of that fragrance is much. The earth is home, and the scent of it is the scent of infancy and home. Childhood knows it better than does the ploughman following the new furrow. Childhood has had it so near, and has learned it once for all, and will never be deceived, nor will the man who has had a childhood near living earth; he knows that the springs are two. He knows, for he remembers that he knew, the spirit of the place. That is an aura that lies near the ground. It is a warm atmosphere that does not rise, but breathes by little garden plots in corners; is the very spirit of rivulets and brooks; lurks amongst the maiden-hair that covers the fresh waters of Mediterranean hillsides, and amongst the gravel of old sunny garden terraces; is so caught in moss that the air where moss grows seems to imprison it; and passes quick into the nostrils of young children. All low-growing flowers--ground-ivy, and things that are not so tall as grass--are entangled with the spirit of place. Low box hedges are intricate with it, and with the spirit of antiquity, because they are no higher than the heads of very little children, whose hearts conceive antiquity and the genius of places. They know the breath of the parks well. What children know--what they knew--we have never forgotten. And yet all the differences which they learned--the difference between the weak odour of soot and the gentle odour of earth, and the difference between the click of the bit and the sound of the bee--are not the real difference between the town spring and the spring of the natural world. They are mere signs and proofs; the fact lies deep and close; there are two springs. [Illustration: WATERLOO BRIDGE.]