The pleasure of the water itself was inexhaustible.
Here sweeping in a mass along the race; there divided into branches and hurrying through the walls of the various houses; here sliding through a wooden channel across the floor to fall into the river in a half-concealed cataract, there bubbling up through the bottom of a huge wooden cave or vat, there resting placid in another; here gurgling along a spout; there flowing in a narrow canal through the green expanse of the well-mown bleaehfield, or lifted from it in narrow curved wooden scoops, like fairy canoes with long handles, and flung in showers over the outspread yarn--the water was an endless delight.
It is strange how some individual broidery or figure upon Nature's garment will delight a boy long before he has ever looked Nature in the face, or begun to love herself.

But Robert was soon to become dimly conscious of a life within these things--a life not the less real that its operations on his mind had been long unrecognized.
On the grassy bank of the gently-flowing river, at the other edge of whose level the little canal squabbled along, and on the grassy brae which rose immediately from the canal, were stretched, close beside each other, with scarce a stripe of green betwixt, the long white webs of linen, fastened down to the soft mossy ground with wooden pegs, whose tops were twisted into their edges.

Strangely would they billow in the wind sometimes, like sea-waves, frozen and enchanted flat, seeking to rise and wallow in the wind with conscious depth and whelming mass.

But generally they lay supine, saturated with light and its cleansing power.
Falconer's jubilation in the white and green of a little boat, as we lay, one bright morning, on the banks of the Thames between Richmond and Twickenham, led to such a description of the bleachfield that I can write about it as if I had known it myself.
One Saturday afternoon in the end of July, when the westering sun was hotter than at midday, he went down to the lower end of the field, where the river was confined by a dam, and plunged from the bank into deep water.

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.