One advantage we have secured out of our dry April. Ever since our
arrival we have wanted an additional water-stand for the garden, but
various causes, chiefly I think dislike to making any more inroads upon
the bracken, have hindered us from setting one up. When it comes to
dragging watering-pots several hundred yards while the year is still
only three months old, imagination pictures what fatigues will be ours
in July and August. A new stand accordingly has been established, and an
ugly scar the laying of it has made through the copse. Now however that
part of the business is done; the grass sods, carefully laid on one
side, are back in their places again, and one must only hope that the
bracken, safely curled away underground, knows little or nothing about
the transaction.
As its practical outcome we have, rising out of the ground, a short
stiff pipe of lead, which has been more or less dexterously hidden away
in the heart of one of our stunted oaks. I am ashamed to confess the
intense, the childish satisfaction I found this morning in turning our
new tap for the first time, and seeing the water gush out in one free
bound, as if glad of its escape; looking as clear too, as if newly come
from the heart of a glacier, or upon its way to the edge of some
Atlantic cliff, there to be caught by the wind, as I have often seen it
caught, and sent back high overhead, in one dancing, rainbow-coloured
feather of light.
“Take you at your commonest, at your ugliest, and what a lovely thing
you are!” I thought, as I let the tap run for a few minutes, and stood
to watch the water beginning to create little rills and runnels for
itself, and to feed the dry copse, the dead leaves, brambles, withered
bracken, everything within reach, with the first full rush of its
benevolence.
I do not know that I am more given than other people to proclaiming
aloud that I have too many blessings; that Nature has been too generous,
and too bountiful in her benefits on my behalf. Now and then however it
has occurred to me to ask myself what I--or, for that matter, other
people--have done to deserve this free unstinted gift of clear, pure
water. In and out of our houses; through our pipes and conduits; into
all our tubs and washhand basins, it flows and flows continually, and we
take it as an absolute matter of course that it should do so, rarely
even taking the trouble to say “Thank you.”
By way of commentary upon the above reflection I have just taken up a
newspaper from the table, and this is what has met my eye. It is an
extract apparently out of a letter home.
“We found some water at last near Stinkfontein"--suggestive name--“but
the place was very shallow, and the mud black and deep. We could not get
the horses to look at it, but the men drank it greedily, and drank it
too at the only place where they could reach it, which was where the
hoofs had churned it into a blackish liquor, thick as soup.”
Poor Tommy! Yet there are people who declare that you are not fond of
water! Evidently this is another of those libels of which you have been
too long the subject.