It was a golden morning as we left Warwick, and with slow feet followed Avon down through the park towards Barford Bridge, where our canoe lay ready for us. The light, too generously spread to dazzle, bathed the castle towers, lay on the terraces, where the peacocks sunned themselves, and on the living rock below them, where the river washes. Only on the weir it fell in splashes, scattered through the elms’ thick foliage. At the water’s brim, below Mill Street, stood a man with a pitcher--a stranger to us--who took our farewells with equable astonishment. The stream slackened its hurry, and, keeping pace with our regrets, loitered by the garden slopes, by the great cedars that the Crusaders brought from Lebanon, among reeds and alder-bushes and under tall trees, to the lake, where a small tributary comes tumbling from Chesterton.
The land, as we went on, was full of morning sounds--the ring of a wood-feller’s axe, the groaning of a timber-wagon through leafy roads, the rustle of partridges, the note of a stray blackbird in the hedge, and in valleys unseen the tune of hounds cub-hunting--
“matched in mouth like bells, Each unto each.”
[Illustration: WARWICK CASTLE, FROM THE PARK]
At Barford we met the pack returning, and the sight of them and the huntsman’s red coat in the village street was pleasant as a remembered song.
Barford village has produced a well-known man of our time, Mr. Joseph Arch, who here began his efforts to better the condition of the agricultural laborer. If without honor, he is not without influence in his own country, to judge by the neat cottages and trim gardens beside the road. Roses love the rich clay, and roses of all kinds thrive here, from the Austrian brier to the Gloire de Dijon. It was late in the season when we passed, but many clusters lingered under the cottager’s thatch, and field and hedge also spoke of past plenty.
By Barford Bridge, where a dumpy, water-logged punt just lifted her stern and her pathetic name (the Dolly Dobs) above the surface, we launched our canoe again. The stream here is shallow and the current fast, with a knack of swinging you round a gravelly corner and tilting you at the high scooped-out bank on the other side. So many and abrupt are these bends that the slim spire of Sherborne across the meadows appeared now to right, now to left; now dodged behind us, now stood up straight ahead. Out of the water-plants at one corner rose a brace of wild-duck, and sailed away with the sun gleaming on their iridescent necks. We followed them with our eyes, and grew aware that the country was altered. Sometimes, near Warwick, we had longed to exchange tall hedge-rows and heavy elms for “an acre of barren ground, ling, heath, brown furze, anything,” as Gonzalo says. Now we had full air and a horizon. We had the flowers, too--the forget-me-not, the willow-herb, and meadowsweet (though long past their prime), the bright yellow tansy, and the loosestrife, with a stalk growing blood-red as its purple bloom dropped away. Just above Wasperton we came on a young woman in a boat. She had been gathering these flowers by the armful, and, having piled the bows with them, made a taking sight; and, being ourselves not without a certain savage beauty, we did not hesitate to believe our pleasure reciprocated.