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Updated: June 4, 2025
It was a charming little sylvan scene that met his eyes. The spot had been fitly called Ophelia's Pool. The small pond was shut in with rowans and thickets of alder and blackberry bushes, and on the pond itself some water-lilies and other aquatic plants were growing.
It is only in my own little wee glens among the rowans that I can feel careless like the birds, and sing; when I walk the woods or stand upon the shore and see the hills without a tree or tenant, when the land is white with the snow and the mist is trailing, Olivia Lamond is not very cheery.
At the head there was a tiny clachan, nestled among birches and rowans, where a tawny burn wound to the sea. When I entered the place it was about four o'clock in the afternoon, and peace lay on it like a garment. In the wide, sunny street there was no sign of life, and no sound except of hens clucking and of bees busy among the roses.
And Autumn, in mellow haze down on the fields and woods; smears of gold already on the beeches, smears of crimson on the rowans, the apple-trees still burdened, and a flax-blue sky well-nigh merging with the misty air; the cattle browsing in the lingering golden stillness; not a breath to fan the blue smoke of the weed-fires and in the fields no one moving who would disturb such mellow peace?
"Or perhaps you have seen so many others since rowans and berries and flowers that you can't, remember one from another?" Olof's hand trembles, and his face turns white as the sleeves of his shirt. The woman laughs again boldly, and flings herself on the sofa in a careless pose. "Well, here we are again staring at each other what? Didn't use to stare that way, did we? What do you say?"
To be sure, I laughed over this; but it was rather tremulous laughter; and I was glad to get my bundle on my staff's end and set out over the ford and up the hill upon the farther side; till, just as I came on the green drove-road running wide through the heather, I took my last look of Kirk Essendean, the trees about the manse, and the big rowans in the kirkyard where my father and my mother lay.
"O for a live face," he thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to waste his days in that joyless, pastoral place, and death come to him, and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh out in a thunder-peal at the huge fiasco.
Now and again small birds fled upwards with shrill twitters at our approach, and settled again to resume their interrupted suppers; but after a while they left for their roosts in the rowans and sycamores to the south, and rabbits began to show themselves in the open spaces among the furze. As if reluctantly, the perfect day drew to its close.
But Aronsen had a garden, with a fence all round, and currant bushes and asters and rowans and planted trees ay, a real garden. There was a broad path down it, where Aronsen could walk o' Sundays and smoke his pipe, and in the background was the verandah of the house, with panes of coloured glass, orange and red and blue.
It was something to have grown up contemporary, as it were, with these songs. Many of them were written in the old Rowan homestead, just outside of Bardstown, Ky., where Louis Philippe lived and taught, and for a season Talleyrand made his abode. The Rowans were notable people.
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