io6 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



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 greer 

 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 spider's 

 lace sparkling with rainbow-coloured dewdrops, know- 

 ing 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 than the sea-gulls, 

 for they were all purest white, with no colour except 

 on their yellow beaks. The light wind ruffled their 



