And Claude pointed to the clean large fields, with their neat close-clipt hedge-rows, among which here and there stood cottages, more than three-fourths of them new.

“Those well-drained fallow fields, ten years ago, were poor clay pastures, fetlock deep in mire six months in the year, and accursed in the eyes of my poor dear old friend, Squire Lavington; because they were so full of old moles’-nests, that they threw all horses down.  I am no farmer:  but they seem surely to be somewhat altered since then.”

As he spoke, they turned off the main line of the rolling clays toward the foot of the chalk hills, and began to brush through short cuttings of blue gault and “green sand,” so called by geologists, because its usual colours are bright brown, snow-white, and crimson.

Soon they get glimpses of broad silver Whit, as she slides, with divided streams, through bright water-meadows, and stately groves of poplar, and abele, and pine; while, far aloft upon the left, the downs rise steep, crowned with black fir spinnies, and dotted with dark box and juniper.

Soon they pass old Whitford Priory, with its numberless gables, nestling amid mighty elms, and the Nunpool flashing and roaring as of old, and the broad shallow below sparkling and laughing in the low, but bright December sun.

“So slides on the noble river, for ever changing, and yet for ever the same—­always fulfilling its errand, which yet is never fulfilled,” said Stangrave,—­he was given to half-mystic utterances, and hankerings after Pagan mythology, learnt in the days when he worshipped Emerson, and tried (but unsuccessfully) to worship Margaret Fuller Ossoli,—­“Those old Greeks had a deep insight into nature, when they gave to each river not merely a name, but a semi-human personality, a river-god of its own.  It may be but a collection of ever-changing atoms of water;—­what is your body but a similar collection of atoms, decaying and renewing every moment?  Yet you are a person; and is not the river, too, a person—­a live thing?  It has an individual countenance which you love, which you would recognise again, meet it where you will; it marks the whole landscape; it determines probably the geography and the society of a whole district.  It draws you, too, to itself by an indefinable mesmeric attraction.  If you stop in a strange place, the first instinct of your idle half-hour is, to lounge by the river.  It is a person to you; you call it—­Scotchmen do, at least—­she, and not it.  How do you know that you are not philosophically correct, and that the river has a spirit as well as you?”

“Humph!” said Claude, who talks mysticism himself by the hour, but snubs it in every one else.  “It has trout, at least; and they stand, I suppose, for its soul, as the raisins did for those of Jean Paul’s gingerbread bride and bridegroom and peradventure baby.”

“Oh you materialist English! sporting-mad all of you, from the duke who shooteth stags to the clod who poacheth rabbits!”