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Rh in the scale, and from the tall grasses a whisper and a sigh. A late cuckoo chimed, still mellow-throated, doves moaned softly, thrushes fluted their repeated notes from bush to bush, calling to one another in the joy of the great vigorous life that filled these enchanted glades, and out in the open larks, black specks against the blue, hung over the nests of their mates, and towered in the triumph of their song. But best of all, pervasive even as the hum of bees, was the ripple and gurgle and chuckle and pouring of water, that one note more liquid than the nightingale's.

Right down the centre of the glade came the stream, brimmed with the rains of spring, and filling its bed from edge to edge. Here its course lay over gravel-beds, and the pebbles glanced and glimmered with the living light that the sun poured down through the pellucid transparency of the water. Then came a sharp elbow in its course, and it fretted its way, with sound of melodious outpouring, through the tangled roots of some tree that stood bare in the angle of the turning. Then for a space the ground was more clayey, and a carpet of green water-weeds were combed and waved by the woven ropes of water. Deeper pools lay here, and under the protection of the banks, where some promontory of rocky stuff made a breakwater, the broad fans of water-lilies and the golden crown of their blossoms found anchorage for their sappy stems. Dragon-flies, as if revisiting the scenes of their childhood, where they had nosed in the mud, or lain, blind, pupæ till the spring of their awakening, hovered iridescent and flashed like jewels flying through the air over the sunlit shallows; white-throated swallows skimmed up-stream, and companies of swifts chided together. Rushes waded knee-deep into the water, loose-strife stepped gingerly to the brink, and to all the stream prattled and sang and went on its sweet way.

Amelie laid down her brushes, and held out her sketch to Bertie.