Have you ever heard the Little People of the Streams singing in the night? I wonder!
Once you have heard their music you will never forget it!
The first time I heard it was one February—shortly after I had taken the cottage—the season above all others when the brooks and falls and mountain springs are over-full of water, that hurries along at a great pace, tumbling over rocks, dropping down into green wells and grottos below, always galloping down hill till finally it reaches the ever-rushing river in the valley.
By day, each brook seems merely to be chatting sociably to the banks and the long harts-tongue ferns as it passes down, and you only hear one at a time. But after dark, when most other sounds have ceased, the voices of the streams seem to grow marvellously in volume.
I was lying awake one night with the windows open, listening literally to the sound of many waters, and trying to disentangle them.
First I heard the spring outside my garden gate as it scrambled down from the hillside above, splashing the overhanging greenery with light spray, and finally pouring out of a little trough—dark brown wood, closely enamelled with green mosses—into a rocky pool, where it ceases its swirl for half a minute, just while it gets its breath, before rushing on down the hill, finding its own way around, or over, all sorts of obstacles, and resenting any interference of man.
Soon I could distinguish a second brook, that serves a cottage a quarter of a mile further along the lane, before it winds about and enters my lower orchard. This had overflowed in the orchard, and was having quite a gay time, running skittishly out of the orchard gate and into another lane, instead of pursuing its proper course.
Next I was able to detach the conversation of the small waterfall that drops about a hundred feet from an overhanging ledge of rock into a green cave under the hill, where mosses of wonderful size abound, and yellow flags stand guard at the entrance, with creeping jenny and forget-me-nots just outside.
The sound always seems to increase as you listen, and soon I detected the noise of the river as it tears over successive weirs. If the tide is low it is often a roar when you stand on the river bank beside a weir; but up here on the heights the noise is softened to a purling sound, that runs like a never-ceasing ground-bass or pedal note amid the fluctuating tones of the nearer streams.
Other and more distant murmurings floated in at the window; but one could never allocate them all, for, excepting in the hottest weather, this is in truth “a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills.”