Quite early on the glorious cloudless midsummer day he was down by the river side, sitting on a rock, with his shoes and stockings off, paddling his feet in the clear tepid water, and watching the million fish in the shallows black fish and grayling--leaping and flashing in the sun.
There is no pleasure that I have ever experienced like a child's midsummer holiday.

The time, I mean, when two or three of us used to go away up the brook, and take our dinners with us, and come home at night tired, dirty, happy, scratched beyond recognition, with a great nosegay, three little trout, and one shoe, the other one having been used for a boat till it had gone down with all hands out of soundings.
How poor our Derby days, our Greenwich dinners, our evening parties, where there are plenty of nice girls, are after that! Depend on it, a man never experiences such pleasure or grief after fourteen as he does before, unless in come cases in his first love-making, when the sensation is new to him.
But, meanwhile, there sits our child, barelegged, watching the forbidden ground beyond the river.

A fresh breeze was moving the trees, and making the whole a dazzling mass of shifting light and shadow.

He sat so still that a glorious violet and red king-fisher perched quite close, and, dashing into the water, came forth with a fish, and fled like a ray of light along the winding of the river.

A colony of little shell parrots, too, crowded on a bough, and twittered and ran to and fro quite busily, as though they said to him, "We don't mind you, my dear; you are quite one of us." Never was the river so low.