The Water-Babies. Charles Kingsley

all the wheels run down;

      Creep home, and take your place there,

      The spent and maimed among:

      God grant you find one face there,

      You loved when all was young.

      Those are the words: but they are only the body of it: the soul of the song was the dear old woman’s sweet face, and sweet voice, and the sweet old air to which she sang; and that, alas! one cannot put on paper.  And at last she grew so stiff and lame, that the angels were forced to carry her; and they helped her on with her wedding-dress, and carried her up over Harthover Fells, and a long way beyond that too; and there was a new schoolmistress in Vendale, and we will hope that she was not certificated.

      And all the while Tom was swimming about in the river, with a pretty little lace-collar of gills about his neck, as lively as a grig, and as clean as a fresh-run salmon.

      Now if you don’t like my story, then go to the schoolroom and learn your multiplication-table, and see if you like that better.  Some people, no doubt, would do so.  So much the better for us, if not for them.  It takes all sorts, they say, to make a world.

      CHAPTER III

      “He prayeth well who loveth well

      Both men and bird and beast;

      He prayeth best who loveth best

      All things both great and small:

      For the dear God who loveth us,

      He made and loveth all.”

COLERIDGE.

      Tom was now quite amphibious.  You do not know what that means?  You had better, then, ask the nearest Government pupil-teacher, who may possibly answer you smartly enough, thus -

      “Amphibious.  Adjective, derived from two Greek words, amphi, a fish, and bios, a beast.  An animal supposed by our ignorant ancestors to be compounded of a fish and a beast; which therefore, like the hippopotamus, can’t live on the land, and dies in the water.”

      However that may be, Tom was amphibious: and what is better still, he was clean.  For the first time in his life, he felt how comfortable it was to have nothing on him but himself.  But he only enjoyed it: he did not know it, or think about it; just as you enjoy life and health, and yet never think about being alive and healthy; and may it be long before you have to think about it!