WHITE DUCK 105 



thrill and held me, and after I had passed on would 

 not allow me to drop it out of my mind. All the 

 objects I had seen that day, the lichened farmhouses 

 and grey barns, trees and roads and purple hedges, 

 red and black cows in a green field, and gulls and 

 rooks and distant low hills and pine woods, with 

 many more, had appeared to me but as a fringe and 

 small parts of an irregular scattered pattern on the 

 green mantle of earth. This new sight was of a different 

 order, for it took me out of my spring-grass mood, 

 and the green mantle which had seemed the chief 

 thing was now but a suitable setting to this lovely 

 object. 



This, then, is what I saw. In the middle of a green 

 pasture I came on a pool of rain-water, thirty or 

 forty feet long, collected in a depression in the ground, 

 of that blue colour sometimes seen in a shallow pool 

 in certain states of the atmosphere and sunlight — 

 an indescribable and very wonderful tint, unlike the 

 blue of a lake or of the deep sea, or of any blue flower 

 or mineral, but you perhaps think it more beautiful 

 than any of these; and if it must be compared with 

 something else it perhaps comes nearest to deep sap- 

 phire blues. When an artist in search of a subject 

 sees it he looks aside and, going on his way, tries to 

 forget it, as when he sees the hedges hung with 

 spiders' lace sparkling with rainbow-coloured dew- 

 drops, knowing that these effects are beyond the 

 reach of his art. And on this fairy lake in the midst 

 of the pale green field, its blue surface ruffled by the 

 light wind, floated three or four white ducks; whiter 



