Sitting down by a spring that gushed up at the
foot of a great sycamore tree, the grandly bearded traveller, all
flushed with the roses of exercise, made no unpleasing picture of a Pan
waiting for Echo by appointment, or holding talk with the grazing goats
of the poor on the open fields around him.
"How changed!" spoke the traveller aloud. "I have caught fishes all
along this brook, and waded up its bed in summer to cool my feet. The
girl was beside me whose slender feet in innocent exposure were placed
by mine to shame their coarser mould. We thought we were in love, or as
near it as are the outskirts to some throbbing town partly instinctive
with a coming civic destiny. Alas! the little brook that once ran
unvexed to the river, freshening green marshes at its outlet, has become
a sewer, discolored with dyes of factories, and closed around by
tenements and hovels till its purer life is over. My playmate, too,
flowed on to womanhood, till the denser social conditions shut her in;
she mingled the pure current of her life with another more turgid, and
dull-eyed children, like houses of the suburbs, are builded on her
bosom. I am alone, like this old tree, beside the spring where once I
was a sapling, and still, like its waters, youth wells and wells, and
keeps us yet both green in root.
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