“Robes loosely flowing, hair as free;
Such sweet neglect more taketh me.”
To drop metaphor, which has a tendency to drop itself, we are in despair over this dryness, and as a consequence have had to resort already to the aid of our watering-pots. Now in April the watering-pot ought in my opinion to be still reposing in its tool shed, with the early spider weaving his first web across its spout. So strongly is this impressed upon my mind that I feel as if there were something illicit, something I might almost go so far as to call unprincipled, in resorting to its assistance thus prematurely. After all though, a gardener’s first virtue, I reflect, is to save his plants, and unless we promptly take some step of the kind, ours for a surety will for the most part die.
April 11, 1900
ONE advantage we have secured out of our dry April. Ever since our arrival we have wanted an additional water-stand for the garden, but various causes, chiefly I think dislike to making any more inroads upon the bracken, have hindered us from setting one up. When it comes to dragging watering-pots several hundred yards while the year is still only three months old, imagination pictures what fatigues will be ours in July and August. A new stand accordingly has been established, and an ugly scar the laying of it has made through the copse. Now however that part of the business is done; the grass sods, carefully laid on one side, are back in their places again, and one must only hope that the bracken, safely curled away underground, knows little or nothing about the transaction.
As its practical outcome we have, rising out of the ground, a short stiff pipe of lead, which has been more or less dexterously hidden away in the heart of one of our stunted oaks. I am ashamed to confess the intense, the childish satisfaction I found this morning in turning our new tap for the first time, and seeing the water gush out in one free bound, as if glad of its escape; looking as clear too, as if newly come from the heart of a glacier, or upon its way to the edge of some Atlantic cliff, there to be caught by the wind, as I have often seen it caught, and sent back high overhead, in one dancing, rainbow-coloured feather of light.
“Take you at your commonest, at your ugliest, and what a lovely thing you are!” I thought, as I let the tap run for a few minutes, and stood to watch the water beginning to create little rills and runnels for itself, and to feed the dry copse, the dead leaves, brambles, withered bracken, everything within reach, with the first full rush of its benevolence.
I do not know that I am more given than other people to proclaiming aloud that I have too many blessings; that Nature has been too generous, and too bountiful in her benefits on my behalf. Now and then however it has occurred to me to ask myself what I—or, for that matter, other people—have done to deserve this free unstinted gift of clear, pure water. In and out of our houses; through our pipes and conduits; into all our tubs and washhand basins, it flows and flows continually, and we take it as an absolute matter of course that it should do so, rarely even taking the trouble to say “Thank you.”
By way of commentary upon the above reflection I have just taken up a newspaper from the table, and this is what has met my eye. It is an extract apparently out of a letter home.
“We found some water at last near Stinkfontein"—suggestive name—“but the place was very shallow, and the mud black and deep. We could not get the horses to look at it, but the men drank it greedily, and drank it too at the only place where they could reach it, which was where the hoofs had churned it into a blackish liquor, thick as soup.”
Poor Tommy! Yet there are people who declare that you are not fond of water! Evidently this is another of those libels of which you have been too long the subject.