He walked fast, and was soon out of the town and among the lanes. They were decked with the full bloom of the wild roses, and the meadows were golden with buttercups; but these the composer did not even see. Birds sang everywhere, but he did not hear them. He was just conscious that the sun was shining on him, but his eyes were fixed on the ground, and his mind was so full of his own troubles that there was no room in it for anything nicer to enter there. He was thinking that his song would never be written, for he could not bear to write anything that should be unworthy of those words, or second-rate as music; and it seemed as if his brain would never again yield him any music that he could be satisfied with. “I shall be behindhand,” he thought to himself. “I shall have to write and say I can’t carry out my undertaking; my one chance will be lost, and all my hopes with it. I shall lose my reputation and my pupils, and then there will be nothing left but beggary and a blighted life!” And he worked himself up into such a dreadful state that when he was crossing a river by a bridge, it did actually occur to him whether it would not be as well to jump over the parapet and put an end to his troubles once for all. His mind was so full of himself that for a moment he forgot even his wife and child, and all his friends and well-wishers. He stood by the parapet for some minutes looking over. The swallows and sand-martins were gliding up and down, backwards and forwards through the bridge, catching their food and talking to themselves. A big trout rose to secure a mayfly from the deep pool below, and sent a circle of wavelets spreading far and wide. A kingfisher flashed under the bridge, all blue and green, and shot away noiselessly up the stream; and then a red cow or two came down to drink, and after drinking stood in the water up to their knees, and looked sublimely cool and comfortable. And the river itself flowed on with a gentle rippling talk in the sunshine, hushing as it entered the deep pool, and passing under the bridge slowly and almost silently--“like an _andante_ passing into an _adagio_,” said the musician to himself; and he walked on with eyes no longer fixed on the ground, for even this little glimpse of beauty from the bridge had been medicine to the brain, and it wanted more--it wanted to see and to hear more things that were beautiful and healing.