But notwithstanding these incommodities, 'twas a most delightsome time such as I have ever remembered with pleasure, and shall remember so long as life be left to me. I have seen evil days since then--Thames running red with civil blood, if I may so speak, and all this fair land of England disturbed with the strife of brothers fighting against brothers. But these days had not then come; and if there were signs and tokens of the storms that were gathering, and such doubtless there were for them that had discerning eyes. I was too young to take note of them. And I was newly come from a city where there was but little talk of aught but pestilence and death, and doleful sights and sounds about me on every side, so that the country scenes, full of gladness and life, into which I had, as it were, escaped, were the more exceedingly delightful. Nor is there, methinks, a fairer thing in England, when one is once past the environs of the city, than Thames, nor any season in which Thames is more to be admired than that early summer in which we were then journeying. For the trees are in their fullest leaf and not yet withered at all by the heat, and the river banks are bright with flowers, as the forget-me-nots and the flags, both yellow and purple, and the water-plants, of more kinds than I can name, gay with blossom; also one may see the water-hens and the grebes, leading about their newly hatched broods, and the swans, carrying on their backs their cygnets, whose brown plumes show forth tenderly from out the silvery white, and the halcyons with their comely colours of green and red, carrying food to their young. All these and many more things that I have not the wit duly to describe did I see and note, young though I was, during our voyage.