men forget too easily how much the things they see around them in the landscapes of britain are the work of men. most of our trees were planted and carefully nurtured by man's hand. our ploughs for countless centuries have made even the soil of the plains the lines of a great view; its groups of hedge and of building, of ridge and of road are very largely the creation of that curious and active breed which was set upon this dull round of the earth to enliven it—which, alone of creatures, speaks and has foreknowledge of death and wonders concerning its origin and its end. it is man that has transformed the surface and the outline of the old countries, and even the rivers carry his handiwork.

there is a little river on my land which very singularly shows the historical truth of what[pg 179] i am here saying. as god made it, it was but a drain rambling through the marshy clay of tangled underwood, sluggishly feeling its way through the hollows in general weathers, scouring in a shapeless flood after the winter rains, dried up and stagnant in isolated pools in our hot summers. then, no one will ever know how many centuries ago, man came, busy and curious, and doing with his hands. he took my little river; he began to use it, to make it, and to transform it, and to erect of it a human thing. he gave to it its ancient name, which is the ancient name for water, and which you will find scattered upon streams large and small from the pyrenees up to the northern sea and from the west of germany to the atlantic. he called it the adur; therefore pedants pretend that the name is new and not old, for pedants hate the fruitful humour of antiquity.

well, not only did man give my little river (an inconceivable number of generations ago) the name which it still bears, but he bridged it and he banked it, he scoured it and he dammed[pg 180] it, until he made of it a thing to his own purpose and a companion of the countryside.

with the fortunes of man in our western and northern land the fortunes of my little river rose and fell. what the romans may have done with it we do not know, for a clay soil preserves but little—coins sink in it and the foundations of buildings are lost.

in the breakdown which we call the dark ages, and especially perhaps after the worst business of the danish invasion, it must have broken back very nearly to the useless and unprofitable thing it had been before man came. the undergrowth, the little oaks and the maples, the coarse grass, the thistle patches, and the briars encroached upon tilled land; the banks washed down, floods carried away the rotting dams, the waterwheels were forgotten and perished. there seem to have been no mills. there is no good drinking water in that land, save here and there at a rare spring, unless you dig a well, and the people of the dark ages in[pg 181] britain, broken by the invasion, dug no wells in the desolation of my valley.

then came the norman: the short man with the broad shoulders and the driving energy, and that regal sense of order which left its stamp wherever he marched, from the grampians to the euphrates. he tamed that land again, he ploughed the clay, he cut the undergrowth, and he built a great house of monks and a fine church of stone where for so long there had been nothing but flying robbers, outlaws, and the wolves of the weald.

to my little river the norman was particularly kind. he dug it out and deepened it, he bridged it again and he sluiced it; it brimmed to its banks, it was once more the companion of men, and, what is more, he dug it out so thoroughly all the twenty miles to the sea that he could even use it for barges and for light boats, so that this head of the stream came to be called shipley, for goods of ships could be floated, when all this was done, right up to the wharf[pg 182] which the knight templars had built above the church to meet the waters of the stream.

all the middle ages that fruitfulness and that use continued. but with the troubles in which the middle ages closed and in which so much of our civilisation was lost, the little river was once more half abandoned. the church still stood, but stone by stone the great building of the templars disappeared. the river was no longer scoured; its course was checked by dense bush and reed, the wild beasts came back, the lands of the king were lost. one use remained to the water—the norman's old canalisation was forgotten and the wharf had slipped into a bank of clay, and was now no more than a tumbled field with no deep water standing by. this use was the use of the hammer ponds. here and there the stream was banked up, and the little fall thus afforded was used to work the heavy hammers of the smithies in which the iron of the countryside was worked. for in this clay of ours there was ironstone everywhere, and the many oaks of the weald[pg 183] furnished the charcoal for its smelting. the metal work of the great ships that fought the french, many of their guns also, and bells and railings for london, were smithied or cast at the issue of these hammer ponds. but coal came and the new smelting; our iron was no longer worked, and the last usefulness of the little river seemed lost.

then for two generations all that land lay apart, the stream quite choked or furiously flooding, the paths unworkable in winter: no roads, but only green lanes, and london, forty miles away, unknown.

the last resurrection of the little river has begun to-day. the railway was the first bringer of good news (if you will allow me to be such an apologist for civilisation); then came good hard roads in numbers, and quite lately the bicycle, and, last of all, the car. the energy of men reached adur once again, and once again began the scouring and making of the banks and the harnessing of the water for man; so that, though we have not tackled the canal as we[pg 184] should (that will come), yet with every year the adur grows more and more of a companion again. it has furnished two fine great lakes for two of my neighbours, and in one place after another they have bridged it as they should, and though clay is a doubtful thing to deal with they have banked it as well.

the other day as i began a new and great and good dam with sluices and with puddled clay behind oak boards and with huge oak uprights and oaken spurs to stand the rush of the winter floods, i thought to myself, working in that shimmering and heated air, how what i was doing was one more of the innumerable things that men had done through time incalculable to make the river their own, and the thought gave me great pleasure, for one becomes larger by mixing with any company of men, whether of our brothers now living or of our fathers who are dead.

this little river—the river adur before i have done with it—will be as charming and well-bred a thing as the norman or the roman[pg 185] knew. it shall bring up properly to well-cut banks. these shall be boarded. it shall have clear depths of water in spite of the clay, and reeds and water lilies shall grow only where i choose. in every way it shall be what the things of this world were made to be—the servant and the instrument of man.