He did not marry till rather late in life; and at the time when Arthur was growing up--the time when memory intwines itself most lingeringly with its surroundings, the time which comes back to us at ecstatic moments in later, sadder days--all the _entourage_ of the place was at its loveliest.

Nothing ever equalled the thrill, he has told me, of finding the first thrush's nest in the laurels by the gate, or of catching the first smell of the lilac bushes in spring, or the pungent scent of the chamomile and wild celery down by the little stream.
The boy acquired a great love for Nature, though not of the intimate kind that poets have by instinct.

"In moments of grief and despair," he wrote in later life, "I do not, as some do, crouch back to the bosom of the great Mother; she has, it seems, no heart for me when I am sorry, though she smiles with me when I am glad." But he has told me that he is able to enjoy a simple village scene in a way that others can not easily understand: a chestnut crowded with pink spires, the clack of a mill-wheel, the gush of a green sluice out of a mantled pool, a little stream surrounded by flags and water lobelias, gave him all his life a keen satisfaction in his happy moments.

"I always gravitate to water," he writes.

"I could stop and look at a little wayside stream for hours; and a pool--I never tire of it, though it awes me when I am alone." The boy was afraid of trees, as many children are.