Between The Thickets The Boggy Ground Was Everywhere Covered With Great Tussocks Of Last Year's Dead And Faded Marsh Grass - A Wet, Rough, Lonely Place Where A Lover Of Solitude Need Have No Fear Of Being Intruded On By A Being Of His Own Species, Or Even A Wandering Moorland Donkey.

On arriving at the pond I was surprised and delighted to find half the surface covered with a thick growth of bog-bean just coming into flower.

The quaint three-lobed leaves, shaped like a grebe's foot, were still small, and the flowerstocks, thick as corn in a field, were crowned with pyramids of buds, cream and rosy-red like the opening dropwort clusters, and at the lower end of the spikes were the full-blown singular, snow-white, cottony flowers - our strange and beautiful water edelweiss.

A group of ancient, gnarled and twisted alder bushes, with trunks like trees, grew just on the margin of the pond, and by-and-by I found a comfortable arm-chair on the lower stout horizontal branches overhanging the water, and on that seat I rested for a long time, enjoying the sight of that rare unexpected loveliness.

The chiff-chaff, the common warbler of this moorland district, was now abundant, more so than anywhere else in England; two or three were flitting about among the alder leaves within a few feet of my head, and a dozen at least were singing within hearing, chiff-chaffing near and far, their notes sounding strangely loud at that still, sequestered spot. Listening to that insistent sound I was reminded of Warde Fowler's words about the sweet season which brings new life and hope to men, and how a seal and sanction is put on it by that same small bird's clear resonant voice. I endeavoured to recall the passage, saying to myself that in order to enter fully into the feeling expressed it is sometimes essential to know an author's exact words. Failing in this, I listened again to the bird, then let my eyes rest on the expanse of red and cream-coloured spikes before me, then on the masses of flame-yellow furze beyond, then on something else. I was endeavouring to keep my attention on these extraneous things, to shut my mind resolutely against a thought, intolerably sad, which had surprised me in that quiet solitary place. Surely, I said, this springtime verdure and bloom, this fragrance of the furze, the infinite blue of heaven, the bell-like double note of this my little feathered neighbour in the alder tree, flitting hither and thither, light and airy himself as a wind-fluttered alder leaf - surely this is enough to fill and to satisfy any heart, leaving no room for a grief so vain and barren, which nothing in nature suggested! That it should find me out here in this wilderness of all places - the place to which a man might come to divest himself of himself - that second self which he has unconsciously acquired - to be like the trees and animals, outside of the sad atmosphere of human life and its eternal tragedy!

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