‘Dreadful!’ I exclaimed.
‘Of course it isn’t true,’ pursued Margaret tranquilly.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Oh, such stories never are; they are all romantic nonsense.’
‘How different your streams are from those in the south,’ said I, after a pause; ‘Tennyson’s description of a brook would hardly suit this one.’
‘What is that?’ she inquired.
‘Don’t you know it?’ I asked, letting my surprise get the better of my good manners.
‘No, I never heard it,’ she said, without the least tinge of embarrassment; so I repeated the well-known lines, to which Margaret listened with her eyes still fixed on the rushing water.
‘They are very pretty,’ said the girl, when I had finished; ‘but I should not care for a brook like that. I should think it would be very much like a canal, wouldn’t it?—only smaller. I like my own brook better; and I like Burns’s description of one better than Tennyson’s.’
‘Has Burns described a brook? I wish you would quote it to me,’ said I.