It was a most silvery
September afternoon when we started from the quay at York, and
after escaping from embarkment on a boat going in the wrong
direction, began, with no unseemly swiftness, to scuttle down the
current. It was a perfect voyage, as perfect as any I ever made
on the Mississippi, the Ohio, the St. Lawrence, or the Hudson, on
steamers in whose cabins our little boat would have lost itself.
We had a full but not crowded company of passengers, overflowing
into a skiff at our stern, in which a father and mother, with
three women friends, preferred the high excitement of being towed
to Bishopsthorpe, where it seemed that the man of the party knew
the gardener. With each curve of the river and with each remove
we got the city in more and more charming retrospective, till
presently its roofs and walls and spires and towers were lost in
the distance, and we were left to the sylvan or pastoral
loveliness of the low shores. Here and there at a pleasant
interval from the river a villa rose against a background of
rounded tree tops, with Lombardy poplars picking themselves out
before it, but for the most part the tops of the banks, with
which we stood even on our deck, retreated from the waterside
willows in levels of meadow-land, where white and red cows were
grazing, and now and then young horses romping away from groups
of their elders.
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