BELOW THE RIVER BANK 247 



neath the willows the great beds of Joe-pye-weed made 

 glorious the vistas. Golden-rod, too, nodded at us over 

 the banks, and in the cloistered swales the cardinal 

 flower glowed. Once a great blue heron, resting on 

 motionless wings, went by us overhead, like a perfectly 

 controlled monoplane. Each bend of the river invited 

 to new mysteries. At a break in the trees mild-faced 

 cattle came down to drink and gazed at us with placid 

 curiosity, their forelegs submerged perhaps the cool- 

 est and most luscious sight in nature upon a summer 

 day! Once, through the willows, we saw a country 

 house sitting proudly in its broad acres; once the white 

 spire of a village church; again, at the end of a sun- 

 flecked lane, a green pasture running up a hillside 

 crowned by a sentinel oak. On the dark, quiet water 

 always was a second landscape which shimmered, a little 

 unquiet and reversed, and between the two we floated, 

 down the fairy aisles of a garden, peaceful, unworldly, 

 remote. My formal beds of phlox and antirrhinums, of 

 platycodons and stock and balsam, and my tiny cement 

 pool, looked stiff and mean enough when I came back to 

 them. Even the compost heap was better than they, 

 for it had draped itself with a gigantic squash vine, a 

 mass of sunflowers, a wild cucumber, and a tangle of 

 poppies. Some day I shall own a place which takes in 

 both banks of a river, and the genius of the stream will 

 be my gardener. 



