E. H. Young

Yonder E. H. Young

A boy, slim and white as the silver birches round him, stood at the edge of a pool, in act to dive. The flat stone was warm to his feet from yesterday's sun, and through the mist of a September morning there was promise of more heat, but now the grey curtain hung in a stillness that was broken by his plunge. He came to the surface, shaking his black head, and, when he had paddled round the pool, he landed, glistening like the dewy fields beyond him. Slowly he drew on his clothes, leaving the quiet of the wood unruffled, but his eyes were alert. If there were any movement among the birches, with their air of trees seen mirrored in a lake, he did not miss it. He, too, was of the woods and the water, sharing their life and taking mood and colour from them. He sat very still when he had dressed, with lean hands resting on his raised knees, and eyes that marked how the water in the pool was sinking for lack of rain and how the stream that fed it had become a trickle. In a wet season his flat stone was three feet under water, and there was a rushing river above and below his bathing-place, tearing headlong from those hills which, last night, had been hidden in heavy cloud and might be wrapped in it still for all the low mist would let him know. He saw how the bracken was dried before its time, and the trees were ready to let fall their leaves at the first autumn wind, and how some of them, not to be baulked of their last grandeur, had tried to flame into gold that their death might not be green. There were blackberries within a yard of him but he did not move to get them for the mist was like a hand laid on him; but when at length it stirred a little, thrust aside by a ray of sun, he rose, whistling softly, to take the fruit, and then, barefooted and bareheaded, he walked home across the fields.