It is all gone now--Frog’s pond, the steeple-chase, and the runners. The old school itself has been converted into a museum, and in the long raftered room where we learnt Greek, a crocodile with gaping jaws, stuffed monkeys, and some bottled snakes teach useful knowledge to all who come. When last I was there, they were teaching a blue-nosed boy to make squeaks on the glass with his wetted finger, and he was getting on very well. But from my old seat (under the crocodile) I could see beyond the Berwick woods the wild and tossing hills, already touched with snow, just as when I used to watch the running light upon them, and envy the lives folded in their valleys. Close in front was the bend of the river where Bryan’s Ford swings past Blue Rails, just as it ran one night, still longer ago, when Admiral Benbow as a little boy launched his coracle for the sea. In a shining horseshoe the river sweeps round the spires on Shrewsbury Hill. The red castle guards the narrows, and east and west the Welsh and English bridges cross the water. Below the English bridge I never cared to discover what might come, for the river ran down towards the land of dulness, opposite to the course of adventure and the sun. But to follow up the stream, to scrape across her shingly fords, to watch for the polished surface of her shoals, and move silently over the black depths where no line had reached a bottom--let me die, as Wordsworth says, if the very thought of it does not always fill me with joy! Incalculable from hour to hour, the river never loses her charm and variety. In a single night the water will rise twenty feet, and pour foaming through the deep channel it has been cutting for so many years. Along its banks of sandstone and loam the dotterels run, and rats and stoats thread the labyrinth of the flood-washed roots. There the bullfinches build, kingfishers dig their “tunnelled house,” moorhens set their shallow bowl of reeds, and sometimes a tern flits by like a large white swallow. On tongues of gravel, where the current eddies under the deep opposite bank, red cattle with white faces used to come down in summer and stand far out in the stream, ruminating and flicking their tails, or following us with wondering eyes as we ran naked over the grass and fell splashing into the water. Severn water is full of light and motion. Never stopping to sulk, it has no dead and solid surface, but is alive right through, reflecting the sunshine, green with long ribbons of weed, orange from the pebbly bed, and indigo where the unbreaking crests of its ripples rise. As it passes beneath deep meadows, and under the solemn elms, it whispers still of the mountains from which it came. Into the midst of hedgerow villages and ordered fields it brings its laughing savagery, telling of another life than theirs, of rocks and sounding falls and moorland watersheds. Other rivers may be called majestic, and we talk of Father Tiber and Father Thames, but no one ever called