MOORLAND IDYLLS. 



flashes of light, as Tennyson calls them 

 poise their metallic blue bodies for a second 

 over the ragged-robins that grow in the 

 boggy hollows, and then dart away like 

 lightning to the willow-herb in the distance. 

 It is a world apart, this wee world of the 

 streamlet ; it has its own joys, its own fears, 

 its own tragedies. The big solemn cows, 

 with their placid great eyes, come down to 

 drink at it unheeding, and blunder over the 

 bank, and slide their cloven hoofs to the 

 bottom through the clay, unaware that they 

 have crushed a dozen maimed lives, and 

 spread terror like an earthquake over fifty 

 small fishes. But the trout and the loaches 

 stand with tremulous fins beating the water 

 meanwhile ten yards below, and aghast at 

 the cataclysm that has altered for ever their 

 native reach. Not for fully twenty minutes 

 do they recover heart enough to sneak up 

 stream once more to their ruined bank, and 

 survey with strange eyes the havoc in their 

 homesteads, 



206 



