'O babbling brook,' says Edmund in his rhyme,

'Whence come you?' and the brook, why not? replies.

I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,

To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.
Till last by Philip's farm I flow

To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.

'Poor lad, he died at Florence, quite worn out,

Travelling to Naples. There is Darnley bridge,

It has more ivy; there the river; and there Stands Philip's farm where brook and river meet.

She and James had
Why?

What cause of quarrel? None, she said,

no cause;

James had no cause: but when I prest

I

the cause,

learnt that James had flickering jea

lousies

Which anger'd her. Who anger'd James? I said.

But Katie snatch'd her eyes at once from mine,

And sketching with her slender pointed foot

Some figure like a wizard pentagram
On garden gravel, let my query pass
Unclaim'd, in flushing silence, till I ask'd
If James were coming.
"Coming every

day,"

She answer'd, "ever longing to explain, But evermore her father came across With some long-winded tale, and broke him short;

And James departed vext with him and her."

How could I help her? "Would I-was it wrong?"

(Claspt hands and that petitionary grace Of sweet seventeen subdued me ere she spoke)

"O would I take her father for one hour, For one half-hour, and let him talk to me!" And even while she spoke, I saw where James

Made toward us, like a wader in the surf, Beyond the brook, waist-deep in meadow

sweet.

'O Katie, what I suffer'd for your sake! For in I went, and call'd old Philip out To show the farm: full willingly he rose : He led me thro' the short sweet-smelling lanes

Of his wheat-suburb, babbling as he went. He praised his land, his horses, his machines;

He praised his ploughs, his cows, his hogs, his dogs;

He praised his hens, his geese, his guineahens;

His pigeons, who in session on their roofs Approved him, bowing at their own deserts:

Then from the plaintive mother's teat he took

'Then, while I breathed in sight of

haven, he,

Poor fellow, could he help it? recommenced,

And ran thro' all the coltish chronicle,

each,

And naming those, his friends, for whom

they were:

chase To show Sir Arthur's deer.

In copse and fern Twinkled the innumerable ear and tail. Then, seated on a serpent-rooted beech, He pointed out a pasturing colt, and said:

And with me Philip, talking still; and so We turn'd our foreheads from the falling

sun,

And following our own shadows thrice as long

As when they follow'd us from Philip's door,

Squire."

And there he told a long long-winded tale | Of how the Squire had seen the colt at

grass,

And how it was the thing his daughter wish'd,

And how he sent the bailiff to the farm To learn the price, and what the price he ask'd,

And how the bailiff swore that he was mad,

But he stood firm; and so the matter hung;

He gave them line: and five days after

that

He met the bailiff at the Golden Fleece, Who then and there had offer'd something

more,

But he stood firm; and so the matter hung;

He knew the man; the colt would fetch its price;

He gave them line: and how by chance

at last

(It might be May or April, he forgot, The last of April or the first of May) He found the bailiff riding by the farm, And, talking from the point, he drew him in,

And there he mellow'd all his heart with ale,

Until they closed a bargain, hand in hand.

tent

Re-risen in Katie's eyes, and all things

well.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel covers;

I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;

I make the netted sunbeam dance
Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;

I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;

And out again I curve and flow

To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.

I scraped the lichen from it: Katie walks By the long wash of Australasian seas Far off, and holds her head to other stars, And breathes in April-autumns.

are gone.'

All

So Lawrence Aylmer, seated on a stile In the long hedge, and rolling in his mind

'Have you not heard?' said Katie, 'we came back.

We bought the farm we tenanted before. Am I so like her? so they said on board. Sir, if you knew her in her English days, My mother, as it seems you did, the days That most she loves to talk of, come with me.

My brother James is in the harvest-field :

and fair,

Too fresh and fair in our sad world's best

bloom,

spire,

Stood from his walls and wing'd his entrygates

name

About these meadows, twenty years ago.'

sign-

Whose eyes from under a pyramidal head

own

What lovelier of his own had he than her,

His only child, his Edith, whom he loved
As heiress and not heir regretfully?
But he that marries her marries her
name'

This fiat somewhat soothed himself and wife,

His wife a faded beauty of the Baths,
Insipid as the Queen upon a card;
Her all of thought and bearing hardly

more

Than his own shadow in a sickly sun.

prick'd to death.

'Not proven' Averill said, or laughingly 'Some other race of Averills'— prov'n or no,

What cared he? what, if other or the same?

He lean'd not on his fathers but himself.
But Leolin, his brother, living oft
With Averill, and a year or two before
Call'd to the bar, but ever call'd away
By one low voice to one dear neighbour-
hood,

Would often, in his walks with Edith, claim

corn,

Little about it stirring save a brook!

A sleepy land, where under the same

wheel

him.