200 IWature Stu&lee in Berkshire. 



instant of the day, and even in the darkness of the 

 night, the lake offers to the eye some new combination, 

 some surprise in colour, some attractive disposition of 

 light and shade. Last night it was so grey and 

 monotonous under the high fog which drifted in with 

 the twilight that it could have been reproduced in 

 monochrome. The night before under the sunset 

 light that flushed, not the west alone, but every inch 

 of space in the firmament, it was a weltering tide of 

 subtlest pink and rose. This morning, reflecting 

 the steely clouds which have slowly spread over 

 the heavens, it has all the neutral sheen of a mirror. 

 To-morrow, when the north wind blows, and a clear 

 blue shines in the sky, its rushing waves will darkle 

 into indigo and cobalt, picked out with the flecks of 

 the foam. And so from day to day and from hour to 

 hour the lover of colour who lives with a lake has in- 

 cessant joys as his portion. His eye is gladdened 

 with a chromatic play which never grows wearisome, 

 never satiates, an endless optical symphony. 



But man cannot live by colour alone. Nor is that 

 all which the friendly lake offers to beguile the days. 

 Its sinuous shores invite the feet of the stroller, and 

 the skiff of the loitering rower. Within the compass 

 of its ten miles of shore line it offers the large variety 

 of a little world. Its head waters reach the banks of 

 long upland meadows, stretching away to distant 

 ranges, while it finds its outlet toward the sea in a notch 

 between steep, wooded hills which have all the sem- 

 blance of the Adirondacks. Here its banks are dressed 



