MORNING ON THE RIVER.

Western Star, Issue 1540, 28 February 1891, Page 1 (Supplement)

MORNING ON THE RIVER.

Many a sweet rural picture is passed on the oarsman’s highway between Newton Murren and Moulsford’s Bridge, and, in such a country, all seasons of the year and all times of the day have their charm. The early morning hours upon the riverside provide unending delight to the real lover of nature. Everything is fresh, crisp, and blithe, for the life of the fields and hedgerows is busy and bustling long before the earliest man’s breakfast-time. The ideal climate, cool, but not cold, exhilarating, buoyant, redolent of the delight of life, would bo a perpetual summer morning, such as it is from five unt* nine. Every sight gratifies the eye. Then the dew is still heavy upon the hedgerows and the tall aquatic grasses, and where there is a bit of furzy country there is a tear in every golden flower of gorse. The atmosphere is clearer and more elastic than later in the day. The far-distant rush of trains, the only reminder that there is a world beyond the horizon, and that its daily fret has begun, which at noon is a mere rumble, in this crisp air is sharp and almost shrill. The ring of the scythe under the whetstone many fields away sounds but a few yards off, and the metallic clang of the stable clock at some country house, hidden behind the belts of woodland, half-an hour’s walk as the crow flies, is distinct as the raspy cry of the corn-crake in the yellowing wheat near by. It is bard to say at what season of the day this stretch down to Moulsford Bridge is most charming. To my taste it is the early morning; but poets and lovers would probably prefer sunset, not to say moonlight.—From Rivers of Great Britain.