Some had eaten their dinners before reaching their journey's end, and gazed with longing eyes on such as had been more provident; though we strongly suspected that many had been tempted by false promises and the hopes of sharing the dinner of their companion--hopes not likely to be realised in many cases, judging from what we saw. Oh, how we longed to have had those children under our own guidance for the day, to have taken them to one or another of the sweet spots we knew, so different from the dusty patch of green by the road-side, where the pleasure-vans were drawn up! such spots as we have often described--roads and lanes that lead only to fields; green nooks that seem too beautiful ever to be broken up into highways, as if it would be a sin to crush those lines of white daisies that seem to stretch onward and onward, as if trying to find their way to where, in spring, the primroses and violets and blue-bells nestle on the wood-side banks; spots which for ages have formed an old highway of flowers, over which have flown armies of birds and bees and butterflies; places beside which there ever went singing along with subdued voice some little brook, that seemed to chafe if only a pebble checked its course, as if it murmured at being kept away from the flowers that grew farther on, and which it had come a long way down the hills to look at, from whence the breeze had first blown the tidings about the beauty of the spot in which they grew; and ever over the stream the drooping May-buds waved, as if they tried to match their whiteness against the silver cloud that lay mirrored below, while here and there great trees threw their green arms across it, chequering its onward course with cooling shadows, as if for a little time to give it a pleasant resting-place before it went on again to where the unclouded sunshine falls; for where that pleasant stream goes broadening out, the gaudy dragon-flies meet together to play, and where it runs narrowing in, the black bulrushes, the feathery reeds, and the golden-flowered water-flags nod and bend and rustle together, as if they were never weary of telling one another how pleasant is the scenery around which they grow; spots where the birds seem to come for new songs--sweet notes which they gather from the lapping water and the whistling reeds, and these they sing to the blossoms, and the blossoms breathe them back again to the bees, and the bees whisper them into the bells of the flowers they plunge into, and every insect that alights thereon catches the note, and all day long is humming the low tune high up in the air. To such places as these ought the dear children to be taken, while the pleasure-vans await their return beside the dusty high-road, where only the plantain, the ox-eye, the dead-nettle, and the hemlock grow.