THE WATER BABIES
meadows, and fair parks, and a great house of grey stone, and brown moors above, and here and there against the sky the smoking chimney of a colliery. You must look at Bewick to see just what it was like, for he has drawn it a hundred times with the care and the love of a true north-countryman; and, even if you do not care about the salmon river, you ought, like all good boys, to know your Bewick.
At least, so old Sir John used to say, and very sensibly he put it too, as he was wont to do—
"If they want to describe a finished young gentleman in France, I hear, they say of him, 'Il sail son Rabelais.' But if I want to describe one in England, I say, 'He knows his Bewick.' And I think that is the higher compliment."
But Tom thought nothing about what the river was like. All his fancy was, to get down to the wide wide sea.
And after a while he came to a place where the river spread out into broad still shallow reaches, so wide that little Tom, as he put his head out of the water, could hardly see across.
And there he stopped. He got a little frightened. This must be the sea," he thought. "What a wide place it is! If I go on into it I shall surely lose my way, or some strange thing will bite me. I will stop here and look out for the otter, or the eels, or someone to tell me where I shall go."
So he went back a little way, and crept into a crack of the rock, just where the river opened out into the wide
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