from the winds, it is closed at the end by the great mass of the Ballon d'Alsace, its floor is smooth and level, its richness is used to feed grass and pasturage, and knots of trees grow about it as though they had been planted to please the eye.
Nothing can take from the sources of rivers their character of isolation and repose. Here what are afterwards to become the influences of the plains are nurtured and tended as though in an orchard, and the future life of a whole fruitful valley with its regal towns is determined. Something about these places prevents ingress or spoliation. They will endure no settlements save of peasants; the waters are too young to be harnessed; the hills forbid an easy commerce with neighbours. Throughout the world I have found the heads of rivers to be secure places of silence and content. And as they are themselves a kind of youth, the early home of all that rivers must at last become--I mean special ways of building and a separate state of living, a local air and a tradition of history, for rivers are always the makers of provinces--so they bring extreme youth back to one, and these upper glens of the world steep one in simplicity and childhood.
It was my delight to lie upon a bank of the road and to draw what I saw before me, which was the tender stream of the Moselle slipping through fields quite flat and even and undivided by fences; its banks had here a strange effect of Nature copying man's art: they seemed a park, and the river wound through it full of the positive innocence that attaches to virgins: it nourished and was guarded by trees.
THE PIOUS WOMAN
There was about that scene something of creation and of a beginning, and as I drew it, it gave me like a gift the freshness of the first experiences of living and filled me with remembered springs. I mused upon the birth of rivers, and how they were persons and had a name--were kings, and grew strong and ruled great countries, and how at last they reached the sea.
But while I was thinking of these things, and seeing in my mind a kind of picture of The River Valley, and of men clustering around their home stream, and of its ultimate vast plains on either side, and of the white line of the sea beyond all, a woman passed me. She was very ugly, and was dressed in black. Her dress was stiff and shining, and, as I imagined, valuable. She had in her hand a book known to the French as 'The Roman Parishioner', which is a prayer-book. Her hair was hidden in a stiff cap or bonnet; she walked rapidly, with her eyes on the ground. When I saw this sight it reminded me suddenly, and I cried out profanely, 'Devil take me! It is Corpus Christi, and my third day out. It would be a wicked pilgrimage if I did not get Mass at last.' For my first day (if you remember) I had slept in a wood beyond Mass-time, and my second (if you remember) I had slept in a bed. But this third day, a great Feast into the bargain, I was bound to hear Mass, and this woman hurrying along to the next village proved that I was not too late.
So I hurried in her wake and came to the village, and went into the church, which was very full, and came down out of it (the Mass was low and short--they are a Christian people) through an avenue of small trees and large branches set up in front of the houses to welcome the procession that was to be held near noon. At the foot of the street was an inn where I entered to eat, and finding there another man--I take him to have been a shopkeeper--I determined to talk politics, and began as follows:
'Have you any anti-Semitism in your town?'