the roadside rat-hole, into a grotto of
Antiparos; we have seen in the sunburnt haymaker
a friendly but untutored savage; and having
devoured our bread and meat before we got a mile
upon our journey, we have cheerfully cast
ourselves on the world with a belief in the bounty
of nature. Glancing occasionally at our tremulous
compass, out of respect to our book-knowledge,
we have yet guided our steps by the rules of
eye, of fancy, and of touch. We have struggled
through prickly hedges, staggered over ploughed
fields, trespassed upon private property in
defiance of surly bulls, printed notices, and all the
terrors of horse-whips and law, and by the time
that the sun was high in the heavens we have
begun to feel the pangs of thirst. From that
point of our wanderings everything became
coloured by the hope of finding water. If we
turned to the right or left, it was with the
desire to discover a brook; if we went to the
top of a hillock and took a sweeping view of
the country, it was with a desire to sight some
barn or village where we could beg a cup of
drink. In these straits our dog was an intelligent
and useful companion, and when our
mouth began to feel as if it were full of
paste, and we had tried the plan of sucking a
pebble, to find it a mockery and a snare, this
faithful animal led us down into a valley,
where a clear stream, running over a gravelly
bed and half filled with islands of green
watercresses, was waiting for our refreshment. Without
stopping for a benediction, we were instantly
down on our face, with our mouth sucking
in the water, our hands scooping it up, and
even our cap employed as a water-pouch. We
were not checked by any fear of chilling our
young blood, or by any theory that enough is
as good as a feast. We drank our three times
three, in that reclining position, and were loth
to leave the fountain that had comforted us in
our need. By proposing to trace the friendly
stream to its final outlet in some river, we
appeared to repay the favour we had received,
while we turned our wandering tastes into
something like a useful direction.

In our gipsy-like journeys of this kind—and
they were doubtless many and frequent—we
often reversed this process, and starting on the
banks of a river, a streamlet, or even a canal,
we found a delight in following it upwards to its
source. Then the top-string plummet came into
repeated, but not very clearly defined, usage;
and the dog was sent into the water so often
after pieces of wood, that he came out at last
like a sleek seal, and almost shook himself to
pieces. If he stood for a moment on any spot,
he made it look like a puddly street on a wet
day, and we avoided him as an overcharged
living sponge, ready to give off a shower at any
instant.

In one of these boyish water-course journeys,
undertaken in direct imitation of Mr. Bruce,
the Abyssinian traveller, I remember dabbling,
wading, and raking with some companions in a
small shallow streamlet, like a ditch, some few
miles out of London, when we were addressed
by a pleasant middle-aged gentleman in clerical
costume.

"Young gentlemen," he said, with an air of
melancholy, "I think you would treat that
rivulet with a little more respect, if some one
told you its history."

"We were only hunting a rat, sir," we
replied, somewhat abashed, and thinking that,
perhaps, he might be the owner of the
property.

"You are now standing," he continued, speaking
at us rather than to us, "in the famous
Tyburn Brook, which once flowed from
Hampstead, by many channels, into the Thames, and
which was one of the earliest principal
fountains that supplied your City ancestors with
water."

"Indeed, sir," we said, respectfully but
incredulously, "was it older than the New
River?"

We asked this question, because we knew
something about the New River, and had heard
much about its extreme age.

"It supplied conduits," he returned,
"centuries before the New River was thought of,
and deserves better treatment than it now gets
as the 'King's Scholars' Pond' main sewer."

"Did it give the water for nothing?" asked
one of my companions, who had a natural
aptitude for figures.

"It supplied it for nothing," he replied, "as
all streams and wells do, up to a certain point.
Nature is bountiful, but uncertain: art is exacting,
but reliable. Some people left money to
establish conduit-pipes, and maintain them as a
charity; others erected these structures, and
paid themselves by a recognised toll."

This unexpected lesson in the fields carried
us back, in imagination, to our hateful school,
and sounded very much like the Rev. Mr. Blair's
instructions in English composition. It was
accepted in all politeness, and forgotten
immediately by my arithmetical companion, but it
made a lasting impression upon me. I dreamed
of strange figures pouring out water day and
night into the tankards of water-carriers; some,
like venerable giants with inverted pitchers
under their arms; others, like accommodating
lions worked as pumps, with their tails for
handles, and their mouths for spouts. I was
not easy until I had searched the history of our
London water supply in my school over-time;
and I found the study—like all studies which
we select for ourselves—far more agreeable than
otherwise.

CHAPTER II.

"ANCIENTLY, until the Conqueror's time,"
says old Stow, the best of all London historians,
"and for two hundred years after, the Citie of
London was watered (beside the famous river of
the Thames on the south part) with the river of
Wels, as it was then called, on the west; with
water called Walbrooke, running through the
midst of the Citie into the river Thames—serving
the heart thereof; and with a fourth water
or Boorne, which ran within the Citie through
Langbourne Ward, watering that part in the