After a swim of half-an-hour, he ascended the
higher part of the field, and lay down upon a broad web to bask in
the sun. In his ears was the hush rather than rush of the water
over the dam, the occasional murmur of a belt of trees that skirted
the border of the field, and the dull continuous sound of the
beatles at their work below, like a persistent growl of thunder on
the horizon.
Had Robert possessed a copy of Robinson Crusoe, or had his
grandmother not cast The Lady of the Lake, mistaking it for an idol,
if not to the moles and the bats, yet to the mice and the
black-beetles, he might have been lying reading it, blind and deaf
to the face and the voice of Nature, and years might have passed
before a response awoke in his heart. It is good that children of
faculty, as distinguished from capacity, should not have too many
books to read, or too much of early lessoning. The increase of
examinations in our country will increase its capacity and diminish
its faculty. We shall have more compilers and reducers and fewer
thinkers; more modifiers and completers, and fewer inventors.
He lay gazing up into the depth of the sky, rendered deeper and
bluer by the masses of white cloud that hung almost motionless below
it, until he felt a kind of bodily fear lest he should fall off the
face of the round earth into the abyss. A gentle wind, laden with
pine odours from the sun-heated trees behind him, flapped its light
wing in his face: the humanity of the world smote his heart; the
great sky towered up over him, and its divinity entered his soul; a
strange longing after something 'he knew not nor could name' awoke
within him, followed by the pang of a sudden fear that there was no
such thing as that which he sought, that it was all a fancy of his
own spirit; and then the voice of Shargar broke the spell, calling
to him from afar to come and see a great salmon that lay by a stone
in the water.
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