Wargrave is one of the most delightful of Thames-side villages. There is not much that is old among the houses that line the village street; thatch has almost gone. Wooden beams are not noticeable, except when used in the modern architecture that imitates the old; the material seen everywhere is red brick. Wind and weather, however, soon tone down the asperities of red brick, and from the rich soil creepers spring up quickly to cover it with loving tendrils; so the street becomes a delightful medley of casement windows, gable ends, and bushy foliage. Not the least of the charm is that each small house has its own ideas about frontage, and entirely refuses to stand in line with the rest. There are houses with their doorsteps in the roadway, and houses modestly retiring behind bushes in their strip of garden. Here is a wistaria with a stem as thick as a man's arm, and there roses and sweetbriar, purple clematis and starry jasmine, succeeding and intermingling. Wargrave has learnt to choose the good and refuse the evil of the modern spirit; she is clean and self-respecting as some villages will never learn to be. Her small shops are good of their kind, but self-conscious she is not, or garish, or any other of the horrible things associated with modernity.

The place centres about cross roads, but straggles in many directions, and on the high ground surrounding it many a new house has been built lately, and stands amid delightful grounds.

The church, which is near the open green, where grow fine trees, is of flint, with a red-brick pinnacled tower, half ivy-covered. In the church is buried Thomas Day, author of Sandford and Merton, who was killed by a fall from his horse in 1789. A Norman doorway, a carved oak pulpit black with age, and a huge family pew, tell of long survival, and give the church the same touch of self-respecting dignity that the village has. It can be seen from the water, peeping over greenery near a backwater, with its tower overtopped by trees.

The whole of Wargrave is seen to advantage from the water or from the meadows opposite. Many green lawns slope down to the brink, and the height of the bushy elms is a thing to note. A few Lombardy poplars break the fulness of the bosky foliage with their elongated ovals, and that most graceful of all trees, the wych elm, curves his beautiful lines in soft arches over the velvety lawns or smoothly-flowing water.

The river turns almost a right angle at Wargrave, and, from running eastward, goes due north. The little village, being situated at the bend, gets the benefit of both vistas. The George Hotel, indeed, stands exactly at the angle, and the sweep of the water catches its wharf with full force. It boasts a signboard painted by two R.A.s; this is preserved indoors, while another swings as its proxy in the village street. Placed as it is in regard to the river channel, and with the wide flats of Shiplake meadows opposite, the hotel is exposed, and the very openness of its garden, an attraction which draws hundreds of summer visitors, makes it a butt for the racing winds of early spring. It is a pretty hotel built of brick, with a white painted verandah, after the usual river pattern; and a gigantic wistaria embowers all the front in its delicate mauve in summer, while roses trained over trellis work flash answering colour signals.

The view over the river includes the glowing sunsets, which leave a slowly dying splendour behind a distant bank of trees.

Looking up to the left is the railway bridge, which is not so ugly as it might be; below, every hundred yards shows fresh beauties.

Wargrave backwater is one of the most noted on the river, and in summer, or early spring, is a fairyland of greenery. The entrance is behind the large willow-covered island that lies below the hotel. The tiny arched bridge, not far in, is so low that one has to lie full length in a boat in order to pass under it. This is called Fiddler's bridge, though no local tradition keeps alive the origin of the name. The gentle light shimmers down between the spear-leaved willows in a veil of glory, and the stream is so narrow, one can almost touch the banks with both hands at once. In the main stream meantime, there are several islands decorated with the new rough stuccoed houses now so popular in river architecture, and, at the end where the backwater emerges again, there is a brightly-coloured boat-house. Beyond this, again, is a long stretch where there are generally house-boats. In winter, a little creek on the left bank is a kind of storehouse for them. This is a fine wide reach, and above it rises Wargrave Hill with its large white house conspicuously placed.

Further down, the river makes a succession of curves; and facing up stream is Bolney Court, in a solid, old-fashioned style, of a dull yellow colour, while, behind and around it, the deep blue-green of Scotch firs is seen among the lighter foliage, and on the curving heights which block the vista to the north, the heights above Henley, these trees are conspicuous everywhere. Indeed, evergreens of all kinds flourish well in the chalky soil about Wargrave.

The late C. J. Cornish said somewhere that Thames eyots always seem to have been put in place by a landscape gardener, and those about Bolney recall the words. They are thickly grown over by sedge and osiers, and overshadowed by taller trees; between them, the channels of shining water, half hidden half revealed, gain all the charm of elusiveness. Has anyone ever reflected what a kindly thought it was of Nature's, to arrange that trees growing on the water's edge should invariably take an outward angle, so as to lean over the water? How much less effective the result would have been had they grown inward, may be pictured by imagining a river without reflections. In the stillness of a backwater, or in the narrowed channel beside a large island, the beautiful effect of this outward angle is best seen. If the channel be very narrow, the trunks fold one behind the other in perspective, so as to form an arch over a shining aisle. In the water, all the many-coloured gnarled stems are smoothed by the gentle movement into something softer than the rigid reality, with its hard knots of shadow. The different colouring on the stems of the same species of tree is a thing to marvel at. From the deep mahogany of a joint where the damp has made an open wound, to the faint biscuit-colour of the place where a strip of bark has been newly peeled off, the stems of pollarded willows furnish every brown and yellow on a painter's palette. Many of them are richly crowned by a head of ivy, whose satin-smooth leaves fall in garlands like locks, and sway with every touch of air. These are reflected in the water as a shaded mass of green with no detail.

There are so many varieties of willow that it is difficult for the lay mind to remember them all, and numbers of them are to be seen about Wargrave. It is the Crack willow and the White willow, with long slender leaves, that are commonly pollarded as osiers, though they will grow tall enough if they are allowed to. There is a legend that the mournful droop of the leaves of the weeping willow is a reminiscence of the sad time of the Captivity:

Besides the willows, there are their cousins, the poplars, chief among which, is the fine Populus tremula, whose leaves whisper perpetual secrets, even on the stillest days. This is caused by the broad leaves being attached to a slender flattened stalk. They are silky on the wrong side, and when the wind blows through the foliage it turns a soft greyish white, like a cottony mass. There is a legend that the wood of this tree was used for the Cross, and that in consequence it has trembled ever since, and so its leaves are in a perpetual state of quivering.

The poplar, like the ash, is not kind to neighbouring trees, its numerous suckers taking more than their share of nourishment and moisture from the ground, and the leaves, when they fall, seem to be as destructive as those of the beech, for grass will not grow where they lie.

In spring, these trees shed their long catkins, like hairy caterpillars, all over the water, and they are swept up in heaps into every eddy.

In spite of the delights of summer, there is a time which well bears comparison with it; I mean the first fine days of early spring, before the rest of the world has awakened to the fact that winter is over. And about Wargrave at such times there is to be found great charm by those whose senses are alert. It is true that the splendid hedge that lines the tow-path shows only the long withes of the creepers and no starry flowers; that the graceful sprays of the wild rose now appear barbed and polished and ferocious, instead of sweet and enticing. A bush of barberry or berberis is not often seen in hedges, for the old folk-lore taught that wheat never throve when the barberry was in the hedge; therefore the farmers grubbed it up whenever they found it. But science has confirmed the empirical wisdom of our fathers, for it was discovered that the barberry furnishes the intermediate host for rust in wheat. On the green river bank there are quivering blades of tender green, but no flowers with their umbrella heads of white, or bunchy yellow, or pale mauve. Yet still there are compensations. To begin with, the river itself talks in spring as it never does in summer, and what is better, one can hear it without the interruption of human chatter or noise. One has the whole stretch to one's self, and attuning one's ear to the key of that conversation, one can listen to it sucking at the bank, flop-flopping under the prow of one's punt, chuckling as it races past the pole, and, laughing a little silvery laugh of merriment, that we call rippling—a word we have learnt to adapt to our poor human attempts in the same direction. The river sprites are with us, and very busy they are—ceaselessly busy about nothing at all, and so happy in their activity that to hear them is to laugh for right good fellowship. The wind is in the water, urging them on faster and faster; each wavelet has its crest of foam, and, in the heights and hollows ahead there is every shade of green, from emerald to olive. One must be very still in order to imbibe the real spirit of the scene, for they are shy, these river nymphs, as shy as the birds and beasts that live around them, and have learned the fear of tempestuous man. A shy-bold wren, with a sudden glint of sunlight on his rich brown back, flies to the edge of the water where the punt lies drifting, and then darts back in haste to the shelter of that commanding hedge he never likes to leave. His pertness is all in his appearance; never did looks so belie a timid character! A water-hen, startled by the sudden dip of the pole, flies out of the reeds close by, and skims in a swift low line to the islet opposite; her smooth dark body, with the elongated neck and scant tail, resembles an Eastern water skin.

There is a gentle continuous whispering among the reeds, as if they questioned themselves, with quiet disapprobation, why the river was always in such a hurry. From the field behind the hedge comes the sweet scream of a wheeling peewit, and two large wood-pigeons flap noisily from the tall trees on the island, a very picture of contented domesticity.

We slide on gently, close by the tow-path, until the tall hedge comes to an end, and the green meadows stretch right away from the lip of the river, and around them rise the tree-crowned heights in a semicircle, like the tiers of a giant amphitheatre.

Flop! A water rat dives furtively. Though called a rat, he is in reality a vole, and is almost exclusively graminivorous; in this differing from his namesake, the real rat, which also haunts river banks, especially near mills. With hoarse squawk, a wild duck rises heavily from cover, and after the first difficult spiral, wings off like an arrow, his long neck extended. It is a day of cloud and shadow, and suddenly the light breaks out on the trees ahead with a wild freshness that makes one catch one's breath. It races up stream, and the dun is turned to gold at the touch of its breath. The sweetness of early spring is in the air and in our blood; the larks feel it as they rise:

And there is a stirring of sap and juice in things—small things deep down in dark holes and corners, and in all green and growing things.

After this, how cloying the richness of summer, with its still days, its glaring reflections, the luscious foliage, and the overpowering scents—the thought of it strikes one's senses as the thought of a hothouse would strike a child of the moor and the mountain. And when we remember Wargrave regatta, with its crowded banks, its lined shores, its flags a-flutter, and its noise, we are thankful that August is afar off.

Though we have wandered down stream, the bit above Wargrave is equally attractive. Just beyond the railway bridge the river Loddon flows into the Thames. To pass up it and its tributary, St. Patrick's stream, is no easy feat; yet by using this loop the lock may be evaded, and it is the only place on the river where such a trick is possible. It is, however, far the best to explore this by-way from the other end and to come down stream by its means. To reach it, one must go high up above the lock, beyond the last of the chain of islands which here breaks the channel, and there turn in under a small bridge, into this curious tributary, which starts from the river and returns to it again. It flows at first through wide flat meadows, and then bifurcates, one branch, blocked by a weir, communicating again with the Thames, and the other falling into the Loddon, and with it rejoining the main river.

Part of St. Patrick's stream is fringed by well-grown uniform pollard willows that hedge it like a wall. In summer, when the meadows are rich in buttercups, and the wind hums softly over the clover, bringing wafts of scent, and many a quaint weed adds its note of colour to the general harmony, it is very charming. But the most delightful feature is the growth of the Leucojum Æstivum, or summer snowflake, which is so numerous that it is popularly known as the Loddon lily. This is like a large snowdrop in which several blooms spring from one head. It is also to be found on several of the islands in the main river near, but is not abundant there. The Loddon itself rises far inland: Twyford gets its name from lying near two branches, a twy-ford. The stream is slow, and it is only the swift current of St. Patrick that enlivens it lower down.

Above the mouth of the Loddon there lies an interesting bit of the river. On a large island, owned by the Corporation of London, stands the lock-keeper's cottage, and opposite to it, on the mainland, a delightful old mill-house with tiled roof, and that weather-worn, rather battered appearance, which all self-respecting mill-houses aim at as the perfection of ripeness. The long tongue of the lock island projects down stream like the nose of a pike. In winter, the little moorhens, partly tamed by hunger, and reassured by the absence of those noisy humans who come in such numbers in warmer weather, run about all over it. Other things run too, all the year round; the lock-keeper has a fine stock of hens, but accepts philosophically the fact that he can never rear any chickens "because of the rats." The rats, which are attracted by the ample stores at the mill-house, and find such variety of lodgings along the banks of the stream and in the crevices of the much worn woodwork, are the pest of these places.

The island is a popular camping ground, and the pitches are generally secured early in the season, having been well prepared beforehand by being laid in sand and flints to ensure a dry foundation. There are also a tiny bungalow, to be had for two guineas the week, and a bathing place available. Altogether a very attractive island. The main stream races over the weir, forming a wide tumbling pool below, and on the other side of the island there is a pleasant stretch down to the lock. These lock channels are among some of the most charming places on the river. They are generally very still, with the mass of water hardly moving. On some days every twig is reflected, and the view in this particular one is well worth looking at, as, with the group of the mill buildings rising high on one side, and the cottage with its accompaniment of standard roses on the other, there are the elements of a most satisfactory composition. The meadows slope down at just that angle that shows them off to the best advantage; they are dotted with fine trees and are crowned by clumps of wood, from which sounds the homely cawing of rooks. The red cows stand knee-deep in the placid water, lashing at the flies with their tails; and on the other side is a mass of greenery:

Shiplake stands high above the flat meadows by the river bank. The little flint church, in which Tennyson was married, has a prettily buttressed tower, and around it grow many tall evergreens and waving trees. There are also some interesting old frescoes on the walls, two representing St. Christopher, who seems particularly appropriate in a river church. From the porch, down between two rows of shrubs, one can look on to the top of a mass of trees, which shuts out a bend of the silver river, and beyond them see the blue distance, miles and miles away. Mrs. Climenson, whose book on Shiplake was privately printed, suggests that the name originated in schiff-laacken, for the story goes that when the Danes got so far, their boats stuck on the shoals, and their commander ordered them to be burnt, to prevent a possibility of retreat.