I HAVE named, among many rivers that make music in my memory,
that dirty Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it
again; and the choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a
certain water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there
dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies
deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint
of gold; and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the
snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to
its black heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of
many other mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so
it was when I was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruningknife,
have been busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished
experience, it must be on many and impossible conditions. I must
choose, as well as the point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so
that the scale may be exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite
side may seem to climb to heaven, and the sand by the water-door,
where I am standing, seem as low as Styx. And I must choose the
season also, so that the valley may be brimmed like a cup with sunshine
and the songs of birds; - and the year of grace, so that when I turn to
leave the riverside I may find the old manse and its inhabitants
unchanged.
It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into provinces
by a great hedge of beech, and over-looked by the church and the terrace
of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, and after nightfall
"spunkies" might be seen to dance at least by children; flower-plots
lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the great yew making elsewhere a
pleasing horror of shade; the smell of water rising from all round, with
an added tang of paper-mills; the sound of water everywhere, and the
sound of mills - the wheel and the dam singing their alternate strain; the
birds on every bush and from every corner of the overhanging woods |
