Here a herd of cattle stood
knee-deep in the shallow water, lazily twitching their tails and
snuffing at the stream. The birds were silent now in the glowing
noon; only the reeds shivered and bowed. There, beside a lock with
its big, battered timbers, the water poured green and translucent
through a half-shut sluice. Now and then the springs of thought
brimmed over in a few quiet words, that came and passed like a
breaking bubble--but for the most part we were silent, content to
converse with nod or smile. And so we came at last to our goal; a
house embowered in leaves, a churchyard beside the water, and a
church that seemed to have almost crept to the brink to see itself
mirrored in the stream. The place mortals call Hemingford Grey, but
it had a new name for me that day which I cannot even spell--for
the perennial difficulty that survives a hundred disenchantments,
is to feel that a romantic hamlet seen thus on a day of pilgrimage,
with its clustering roofs and chimneys, its waterside lawns, is a
real place at all.
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