JANUARY 3 



the rays are more oblique, casting those long shadows 

 which the painter has to snatch from summer sunsets. 

 Is the sky overcast? Then what delicate modulations 

 in the cloudy dome, what depth of mystery in middle 

 distances, how faint yet firm are the outlines of distant 

 hills! 



But we are not all poets, to judge by a certain type of 

 journalism which thrives amain; still less are we all 

 potentially artists, or we should be driven raving mad by 

 the field advertisements of pills and soap to which we 

 passively submit. It is as a plain citizen that I am 

 prosing, and this is the scene that has moved me so 

 to do. 



One morning lately (it happened to be a day, as I after- 

 wards learned, when the fog in London was at its densest 

 and yellowest) I stood on the margin of a wood-girt lake 

 before sunrise. To do so involved no great effort of early 

 rising, seeing that the sun did not rise till after eight 

 o'clock, and the lake is but a few hundred yards from my 

 own door. Not a breath was stirring ; there was more 

 cloud than clear in the sky; but it was high, fleecy 

 cloud, cirrus and cirro-stratus. The air was full of 

 sound, for the wild-fowl were just returning from their 

 supper-parties in the marshes and springs, and were 

 settling on the water with much conversation and splash. 

 There was the mallard's homely quack, the musical 

 whistle of the teal, the wilder whew of widgeon ; besides 

 which I could recognise the notes of diving ducks, who 

 are content to take their meals at home that is, where 

 they spend the day. By-the-bye, it is a puzzling thing 

 why certain ducks mallard, widgeon, teal, gad well, 

 shovellers, etc. feed only on the surface, never diving to 



