To get that you must go down and down, hundreds of feet, to the green meadows through which silver Itchen glides toward the sea.  There you stand upon the bridge, and watch the trout in water so crystal-clear that you see every weed and pebble as if you looked through air.  If ever there was pure water, you think, that is pure.  Is it so?  Drink some.  Wash your hands in it and try—­You feel that the water is rough, hard (as they call it), quite different from the water at home, which feels as soft as velvet.  What makes it so hard?

Because it is full of invisible chalk.  In every gallon of that water there are, perhaps, fifteen grains of solid chalk, which was once inside the heart of the hills above.  Day and night, year after year, the chalk goes down to the sea; and if there were such creatures as water-fairies—­if it were true, as the old Greeks and Romans thought, that rivers were living things, with a Nymph who dwelt in each of them, and was its goddess or its queen—­then, if your ears were opened to hear her, the Nymph of Itchen might say to you—­

So child, you think that I do nothing but, as your sister says when she sings Mr. Tennyson’s beautiful song,

   “I chatter over stony ways,
   In little sharps and trebles,
   I bubble into eddying bays,
   I babble on the pebbles.”

Yes.  I do that:  and I love, as the Nymphs loved of old, men who have eyes to see my beauty, and ears to discern my song, and to fit their own song to it, and tell how

   “’I wind about, and in and out,
   With here a blossom sailing,
   And here and there a lusty trout,
   And here and there a grayling,

   “’And here and there a foamy flake
   Upon me, as I travel
   With many a silvery waterbreak
   Above the golden gravel,

   “’And draw them all along, and flow
   To join the brimming river,
   For men may come and men may go,
   But I go on for ever.’”

Yes.  That is all true:  but if that were all, I should not be let to flow on for ever, in a world where Lady Why rules, and Madam How obeys.  I only exist (like everything else, from the sun in heaven to the gnat which dances in his beam) on condition of working, whether we wish it or not, whether we know it or not.  I am not an idle stream, only fit to chatter to those who bathe or fish in my waters, or even to give poets beautiful fancies about me.  You little guess the work I do.  For I am one of the daughters of Madam How, and, like her, work night and day, we know not why, though Lady Why must know.  So day by day, and night by night, while you are sleeping (for I never sleep), I carry, delicate and soft as I am, a burden which giants could not bear:  and yet I am never tired.  Every drop of rain which the south-west wind brings from the West Indian seas gives me fresh life and strength to bear my burden; and it has need to do so; for every drop of rain lays a fresh burden on me.  Every root