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Updated: April 30, 2025
On the far side of the banks we stayed to lunch by the border of a thick belt of sedge and bulrushes, a marshy place stretching over two or three acres, and glowing with the rich colour that comes to southern lands in April and in May. It recalled to me the passage in one of the stately choruses of Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, that tells how "blossom by blossom the spring begins."
A broad bed of shingle, looking just now more like an ill-made turnpike road than the bed of Alva stream; above it, a long shallow pool, which showed every stone through the transparent water; on the right, a craggy bank, bedded with deep wood sedge and orange-tipped king ferns, clustering beneath sallow and maple bushes already tinged with gold; on the left, a long bar of gravel, covered with giant "butter-bur" leaves; in and out of which the hounds are brushing beautiful black-and-tan dogs, of which poor Trebooze may be pardonably proud; while round the burleaf-bed dances a rough white Irish terrier, seeming, by his frantic self-importance, to consider himself the master of the hounds.
He contemplated being able to conceal himself in a heavy sedge of bulrushes that grew along the edge of the river, and towards these he was evidently directing his course under the water. At each emersion he appeared some yards nearer them, until at length he rose within a few feet of their margin, and diving again was seen no more!
At present, from Putney to Richmond the greater part of the Thames flows between natural boundaries. If these can be maintained, the growth of willows, sedge, hemlock, reeds, water ranunculus, and many other fine and luxuriant plants affords insect food for the fish and shelter for the birds, besides giving to the river its natural floral border.
Behind them was the delicious stream, clear and limpid, bordered with sedge and willow and flags, and overhung with branches.
Then as he stood with his hand resting against a tree trunk, peering forward, a curious little head with bright crimson eyes divided the sedge or reeds growing in the water, its owner looking out to see if there was any danger; and as it looked, Robin could see that the bird's beak seemed to be continued right up into a fiat red plate between its eyes.
This they learned had once been a well much visited by pilgrims for its supposed healing qualities. It ran out of an arched recess into a shallow pool, fringed with sedge, and filled with white-flowered cresses and forget-me-not. Below their feet lay a great stretch of rich water-meadows, the wooded hills opposite looming dimly through the haze.
And he began to repeat, slowly, musically, lines of verse which his companion had never heard: 'O what can ail thee, Knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has wither'd from the lake, And no birds sing. He went through the poem; Nancy the while did not stir. It was as though he murmured melody for his own pleasure, rather than recited to a listener; but no word was inaudible.
Young swallows sit fearlessly on the dead willow boughs to be fed by their parents; the reed-buntings and sedge-warblers scarcely move when the oar dips near the sedge on which they sit; wood-pigeons sit on the margin and drink where the pebble-banks or cattle-ways touch the water; and the water-rats will scarcely stop their business of peeling rushes to eat the pith, even if a boatload of children passes by.
So, whether by bridging, leaping, or wading, we arrived at the little islands, and found them covered with a thick, low scrub; deep sedge, and among them Pinguins, like huge pine-apples without the apple; gray wild-pines, parasites on Matapalos, which, of course, have established themselves, like robbers and vagrants as they are, everywhere; a true holly, with box-like leaves; and a rare cocoa-plum, very like the holly in habit, which seems to be all but confined to these little patches of red earth, afloat on the pitch.
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