19 6 AUGUST 



unceasing pleasure as well as wealth, England is full of 

 springs, many of them quite neglected. You find your 

 self treading a marsh even on the hill-top and a few spade 

 fuls of earth could open a bubbling fount. But in the 

 great drought many that were much used vanished, 

 especially in the valleys where stray the streams that give 

 London most of its water. These valleys are thick with 

 springs as our hedgerows with trees. You may watch 

 them bubbling at the head of the watercress beds before 

 they find their well-tutored way to the main stream or the 

 tributaries of the Lea. When the rain fell, we saw in 

 imagination the cresses revive, the hard channel fill and 

 the duck return. The revival must be long. Months of 

 slow evaporation and heavy rainfalls must precede the 

 filling of the bidden stores ; but the time will come. The 

 slaty clouds and the patter of the drops are as sure a 

 promise as the rainbow. 



Some of the surface revival is as quick as the subter 

 ranean is slow. The fine fescues and grasses of the com 

 mons grew not less brown and grey, perhaps browner 

 and greyer than the coarser foxtails and cocksfoots of 

 the meadows ; but they recover their greenness as at the 

 touch of a wand. You may cut a turf of these grasses 

 ten foot long and deal with it as if it were a measure of 

 felt. It will neither crumble nor break, for almost all of 

 it is a woven cloth of roots. The moment this carpet 

 feels the rain, it sends supplies to the blades, and patches 

 of intense greenness appear on the morrow, at any rate, 

 if not on the very day of the downpour. Almost all 

 animals rejoice in the sudden change. That half-nocturnal 

 creature, the rabbit, leaves its burrow the moment the 

 . first shower ceases ; and all along the walls of the West 

 or the hedgerows of the Midlands you may watch the 

 little brown forms making little sallies or performing 



