Life in Autumn Storm 255 



have carved and remoulded the soil since it first 

 began to flow. The splash of a new turf-fall into 

 the dark swirl under the bank seems a note that 

 has been echoing for ages. 



When, after long summer idleness, the river of a 

 wide landscape once more comes striding down its 

 channel in the autumn rains, the whole of nature 

 seems to gain new purpose and power. A summer 

 flood is most often purely sinister ; it is worse than 

 a great landslip or a fire to see the hay-cocks cir- 

 cling in the meadows or the sheaves obscurely 

 rolling in the pools. Hardly less dismal is the sight 

 of the harvest prolonged into ruin under the rains 

 of a hopeless autumn, with uncut barley blackening 

 in November and the green sprouts thick as a 

 grass lawn in the heads of the rotting shocks. But 

 in years when a good harvest is safely carried and 

 the weed-fires have burnt out in the fields, there is 

 the strength of fulfilment in the smell of the ocean 

 rain, and the cluck of the brown water lapping 

 higher hour by hour on the beaches where the 

 adders lay. Then the river becomes the master of 

 the landscape ; it draws into its own strong eddies 

 the streams that brim from a hundred hills and 

 pastures, and the downpour of the groaning sky. 

 That old sense returns of the personal life of rivers 

 which made them gods or demons to early man, 

 and survived in romance and ballad when most 

 other forms of early animism had died away. Of 

 all the objects of nature, only the sea is so readily 

 invested with a conscious life by those who dwell 

 long in the open as rivers and their natal springs ; 



