The Thames was a picture-book river that day, gay with row-boats and punts and launches, yet serene for all its gaiety; slipping between grassy banks under immemorial trees with the air of a private stream wandering, protected, through an estate.  The English have the gift above other nations of producing an atmosphere of leisure and seclusion, and surely there is no little river on earth so used and so unabused as the Thames.  Of all the craft abroad that bright afternoon, General Cochrane’s white launch with its gold line above the water and its gleaming brass trimmings was far and away the prettiest, and I was bursting with pride as we passed the rank and file on the stream and they looked at us admiringly.  To be alive on such a day in England was something; to be afloat on the silvery Thames was enchantment; to be in that lovely boat with General Cochrane, the boy Donald Cochrane, was a rapture not to be believed without one’s head reeling.  Yet here it was happening, the thing I should look back upon fifty, sixty years from now, an old gray woman, and tell my grandchildren as the most interesting event of my life.  It was happening, and I was enjoying every second, and not in the least awed into misery, as is often the case with great moments.  For the old officer was as perfect a playmate as any good-for-nothing young subaltern in England, and that is putting it strongly.

“Wouldn’t it be nicer to land at Sonning and have our tea there?” he suggested.  We were dropping through the lock just higher than the village; the wet, mossy walls were rising above us on both sides and the tops of the lock-keeper’s gorgeous pink snapdragons were rapidly going out of sight.  My host went on:  “There’s rather a nice rose-garden, and it’s on the river, and the plum-cake’s good.  What do you think, that or on board?”

“The rose-garden,” I decided.

Sonning is a village cut out of a book and pasted on the earth.  It can’t be true, it’s so pretty.  And the little White Hart Inn is adorable.

“Is it really three hundred years old?” I asked.  “The standard roses look like an illustration out of ‘Alice in Wonderland.’  Yes, please—­tea in the White Hart garden.”

The old General heaved a sigh.  “Thank Heaven,” he said.  “I was most awfully anxious for fear you’d say on the boat, and I didn’t order any.”

We slipped under an arch of the ancient red bridge and were at the landing.  I remember the scene as we stood on shore and looked down the shining way of the river, the tall grasses bending on either side like green fur stroked by the breeze; I remember the trim sea-wall and velvet lawn, and the low, long house with leaded windows of the place next the inn.  A house-boat was moored to the shore below, white, with scarlet geraniums flowing the length of the upper deck, and willow chairs and tables; people were having tea up there; muslin curtains blew from the portholes below.  Some Americans went past with two enormous Scotch deer-hound puppies on leash.  “Be quiet, Jock,” one of them said, and the big, gentle-faced beast turned on her with a giant, caressing bound, the last touch of beauty in the beautiful, quiet scene.