THE

A ROMAN BROOK

(From "Bits of Oak Bark")

HE brook has forgotten me, but I nave not forgotten the brook. Many faces have been mirrored since in the flowing water, many feet have waded in the sandy shallow. I wonder if any one else can see it in a picture before the eyes as I can, bright and vivid as the trees suddenly shown at night by a great flash of lightning. All the leaves and branches and the birds at roost are visible during the flash. It is barely a second; it seems much longer. Memory, like the lightning, reveals the pictures in the mind. Every curve, and shore, and shallow is as familiar now as when I followed the winding stream so often. When the mowing grass was at its height you could not walk far beside the bank; it grew so thick and strong and full of unbelliferous plants as to weary the knees. The life, as it were, of the meadows seemed to crowd down toward the brook in summer to reach out and stretch toward the life-giving water. There the buttercups were taller and closer together, nails of gold driven so thickly that the true surface was not visible. Countless rootlets drew up the richness of the earth like miners in the darkness, throwing their petals of yellow ore broadcast above them. With their fullness of leaves the hawthorn bushes grow larger-the trees extend further and thus overhung with leaf and branch, and closely set about by grass and plant, the brook disappeared only a little way off, and could not have been known from a mound and hedge. It was lost in the plain of meads-the flowers alone saw its sparkle.

Hidden in those bushes and tall grasses, high in the trees and low on the ground, there were the nests of happy birds. In the hawthorns blackbirds and thrushes built, often overhanging the stream, and the

fledgelings fluttered out into the flowery grass. Down among the stalks of the umbelliferous plants, where the grasses were knotted together, the nettlecreeper concealed her treasure, having selected a hollow by the bank so that the scythe should pass over. Up in the pollard ashes and willows, here and there, wood pigeons built. Doves cooed in the little wooden inclosures where the brook curved almost round upon itself. If there was a hollow in the oak a pair of starlings chose it, for there was no advantageous nook that was not seized on. Low beside the willow stoles the sedge reedlings built; on the ledges of the ditches, full of flags, moor hens made their nests. After the swallows had coursed long miles over the meads to and fro, they rested on the tops of the ashes and twittered sweetly. Like the flowers and grass, the birds were drawn toward the brook. They built by it, they came to it to drink; in the evening a grasshopper lark trilled in a hawthorn bush. By night, crossing the footbridge, a star sometimes shone in the water under foot. At morn and even the peasant girls came down to dip: their path was worn through the mowing grass, and there was a flat stone let into the bank as a step to stand on. Though they were poorly habited, without one line of form or tint of color that could please the eye, there is something in dipping water that is GreekHomeric—something that carries the mind home to primitive times. Always the little children came with them; they too loved the brook like the grass and the birds. They wanted to see the fishes dart away and hide in the green flags; they flung daisies and buttercups into the stream to float and catch awhile at the flags, and float again and pass away, like the friends of our boyhood, out of sight. Where there was pasture roan cattle came to drink, and horses, restless horses, stood for hours by the edge under the shade of ash trees. With what joy the

spaniel plunged in, straight from the bank out among the flags you could mark his course by seeing their tips bend as he brushed them in swimming. life loved the brook.

All

Far down away from the roads and hamlets there was a small orchard on the very bank of the stream, and just before the grass grew too high to walk through I looked in the enclosure to speak to its owner. He was busy with his spade at a strip of garden, and grumbled that the hares would not let it alone, with all that stretch of grass to feed on. Nor would the rooks, and the moor hens ran over it, and the water rats burrowed; the wood pigeons would have the peas, and there was no rest from them all. While he talked and talked, far from the object in hand, as aged people will, I thought how the apple tree in blossom before us cared little enough who saw its glory. The branches were in bloom everywhere, at the top as well as at the side,— at the top where no one could see them but the swallows. They did not grow for human admiration: that was not their purpose; that is our affair only-we bring the thought to the tree. On a short branch low down the trunk there hung the weatherbeaten and broken handle of an earthen-ware vessel; the old man said it was a jug, one of the old folk's jugs, he often dug them up. Some were cracked, some nearly perfect; lots of them had been thrown out to mend the lane. There were some chips among the heaps of weeds yonder. These fragments were the remains of Anglo-Roman pottery. Coins had been found-half a gallon of them-the children had had most. He took one from his pocket, dug up that morning; they were of no value,-they would not ring. The laborers tried to get some ale for them, but could not; no one would take the little brass things. That was all he knew of the Cæsars: the apples were in fine bloom now, weren't they?

Fifteen centuries before there had been a Roman station at the spot where the lane crossed the brook. There the centurions rested their troops after their weary march across the downs, for the lane, now bramble-grown and full of ruts, was then a Roman road. There were villas, and baths, and fortifications; these things you may read about in books. They are lost now in the hedges, under the flowering grass, in the ash copses, all forgotten in the lane, and along the footpath where the June roses will bloom after the apple blossom has dropped. But just where the ancient military way crosses the brook, there grow the finest, the largest, the bluest, and most lovely for-get-me-nots that ever lover gathered for his lady.

The old man, seeing my interest in the fragments of pottery, wished to show me something of a different kind lately discovered. He led me to a spot where the brook was deep, and had somewhat undermined the edge. A horse trying to drink there had pushed a quantity of earth into the stream and exposed a human skeleton lying within a few inches of the water. Then I looked up the stream and remembered the buttercups and tall grasses, the flowers that crowded down to the edge; I remembered the nests, and the dove cooing; the girls that came down to dip, the children who cast their flowers to float away. The wind blew the loose apple bloom and it fell in showers of painted snow. Sweetly the greenfinches were calling in the trees; afar the voice of the cuckoo came over the oaks. By the side of the living water, the water that all things rejoiced in, near to its gentle sound, and the sparkle of sunshine in it, had lain this sorrowful thing.

JEROME K. JEROME

JEROME KLAPKA JEROME, novelist, was born at Walsall, England, in 1861. Early in life he had to shift for himself and became, after trying various professions, a journalist. In 1886, he published "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow," and it jumped at once to the forefront of popularity. Three years later came his most famous work, Three Men in a Boat." This book is as much read to-day as when it first appeared. The adventures of "The Three Men in their trip up the Thames," "To say nothing of Montmorency, the dog," will undoubtedly chase the blues from the overwrought minds of generations to come. His later books include "Letters to Clorinda," "Stories of the Town," and "The Prude's Progress."

PLANS FOR THE TRIP

(From "Three Men in a Boat")

O, on the following evening, we again assembled,

“Now, the first thing to settle is what to take with us. Now, you get a bit of paper and write down, J., and you get the grocery catalogue, George, and somebody give me a bit of pencil, and then I'll make out a list."

That's Harris all over-so ready to take the burden of everything himself, and put it on the backs of other people.

He always reminds me of my poor Uncle Podger. you never saw such a commotion up and down a house, in all your life, as when my Uncle Podger