There still remain, in the meadows by Shifford, traces of earthworks and the stump of an ancient cross, sufficiently proving that this was indeed anciently a place of considerable importance. But commerce with the world of affairs no longer stirs the pulses of Shifford, or the neighbourhood of it, and the Thames steals softly along, between tall palisades, as it were, of rushes, and past the sentinel willows, with only an occasional farmstead in sight; farms where one might almost suppose the farmers to consume their own produce, so remote from all methods of conveying it away do they seem to be. CHAPTER IV HARVESTS OF THE THAMES: WILLOWS, OSIERS, RUSHES The willows, pollarded or left to their natural growth, that form, as it were, a continuous guard of honour along many miles of the upper course of the Thames, and overhang with a wild luxuriance its mazy backwaters, are indeed a guard to those banks in more than fanciful phrase. Their tangled roots clutch them in many-fingered embrace and support them in times of flood, and their gnarled and fantastic trunks serve the useful office at such times (when the meadows are under water and resemble inland lakes) of exactly delimiting the course of the stream, where the current runs deep and strong, and dangerous. Willows we always associate with a watery situation, and their habit is indeed better suited to low-lying meadows and to river-courses than to places high and dry. The great demands the willow makes upon water place it in the forefront as a drainer of marshy soil: and thus not only beside the Thames, but along rivers in general, and in the fens and on Sedgemoor, where the energies of hundreds of years past have been directed towards expelling the water, it is a familiar feature of the landscape. We also inevitably associate the willow, and especially that drooping variety, of the pendant boughs and leaves, known as the “weeping willow,” with melancholy, and, from Shakespeare to W. S. Gilbert, it is associated with unrequited love. The spot where Ophelia met her death is thus described in Shakespeare: “There is a willow grows ascaunt the brook, That shows his hoar leaves on the glassy stream.” The expression “hoar leaves” refers to the under side of the willow-leaf, of a whitish or silvery hue, not unlike hoar-frost; prominently seen when a strong wind ruffles the branches. [Illustration: A THAMES-SIDE FARM.] The love-lorn among the characters in the operas written by Sir W. S. Gilbert plentifully carry on the old tradition, and from Archibald Grosvenor (“The All-Right”) and Patience, in the duet “Hey, Willow-waly O!” to Teresa, in _The Mountebanks_, who sings, “Willow, willow, where’s my love?” they frequently apostrophise this tearful tree. Nay, even in the _Bab Ballads_ we read of a troubadour whose refrain was “Willow, willow, o’er the lea,” and who maintained it with such pertinacity that it is at last rightly described as “his aggravating willow.”