CLEAR WATERS 



or into great moors stretching to infinity, exercised 

 an extraordinary and lifelong influence. Wild 

 horses would not have extracted an admission of such 

 day-dreams even had I been capable of giving expres- 

 sion to this vague sense of continual aesthetic enjoy- 

 ment. I was frequently rallied for absent-mindedness, 

 a new vice I think, and not being then much enamoured 

 of the literary tasks which imprisoned us for a portion 

 of most days, had no excuse for such mental eccen- 

 tricities. I was constantly being offered the pro- 

 verbial copper for my meditations. Had these been 

 capable of articulate shape and the offers been accepted, 

 my seniors would, I think, very often have been pro- 

 perly astonished. It was a wonderful existence in its 

 way for a boy of a sympathetic temperament. There 

 were no lessons in natural history, such would possibly 

 have been regarded as a bore. But simply an atmo- 

 sphere in which you were supposed to know every 

 ordinary fact connected with earth, sky, or water, and 

 you sucked it all in automatically, out of doors. If a 

 master at school, for instance, during a Sunday walk, 

 had pointed out the difference between a chaffinch 

 and a bullfinch, it might have been thought a little 

 tiresome and very likely forgotten. But here was 

 a circle where to confuse a sea-gull with a curlew, 

 or a pigeon with a hawk on the remote horizon was 

 accounted a disgrace, and to mistake a jack for a full 

 snipe simply wrote you down a hopeless ass or a Cockney. 

 This was admirable. All these and a thousand kindred 

 things were taken as a matter of course, than which 

 there is no better school. They were not holiday 

 interludes, but continued for three hundred days 

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