Robbery from Nature 2 1 



never blows evenly across its surface, but in capfuls, 

 whose swift course as they dart hither and thither at 

 various angles is marked in a chase of tiny darkling 

 ripples. It is an ideal ocean for schoolboys, and on 

 holiday and in playhour is white with the sails of their 

 mimic fleet ; for that very reason it is shunned by 

 the ordinary student of nature, who is sure they have 

 stoned or terrified to death every living inhabitant 

 of its water. But to-day they are conning Virgil and 

 Euclid, and look you at the circling wavelets like 

 those produced by the rise of a trout or the bobbing 

 of an angler's cork these never were made by the 

 wind. ^Approach, and in a moment all is still as was 

 the mere whereinto Sir Bedevere plunged Excalibur. 

 Wait a little, however, and a score of heads, each 

 jewelled with eyes of matchless beauty and ' freaked 

 with jet,' like Milton's pansy, are thrust cautiously up, 

 and a company of frogs with the full sweet low en- 

 treaty for which croaking is too harsh a term, recom- 

 mence their interrupted love-making. To the true 

 student of nature who, even to a mean degree, pos- 

 sesses some spark of the spirit that animated a 

 Jefferies or a Thoreau, each little comedy of courtship 

 played there is as interesting as is to old age the in- 

 nocent sweethearting of youth, or a wholesome drama 

 to dawning womanhood ; though perhaps of him, as 

 of Wordsworth's ideal poet, it may be said that he was 



Contented if he might enjoy 



The things which others understand. 



