The Heart of the Wild by S.L. Bensusan

Many people know the river in and round the market-town that stands upon its banks, but very few have seen the parent stream where it passes rippling for some hundreds of yards between narrow banks in the shadow of old willow trees, for here it is on private ground. You could not wish to see more beautiful country. There are high hills crowned with woods and level meadows where grass is always green, and the willows share with the poplars the custody of the water. Tiny little tributaries enter the main stream here and there, but Jock the water-rat looked upon these with some contempt, as though he thought they were suburban. He had his home in the roots under an old willow tree. You saw one hole in the bank just above the water, but there were others under the water, and in the meadow.

When the summer day was fine and long, Jock would sit at the edge of the hole that was made in the bank, and would survey the world with a cautious eye and a contented expression. He was no longer a young water-rat, and he had not passed through his life without learning that he had enemies, but in this part of the river the trout were few and of small size -- far too small indeed to trouble water-rats, and the eels that collected lower down by the mill seldom came in his direction, the feeding was not good enough. Of great coarse fish like pike there was little need for fear, the water was too shallow to tempt them to come so far up. If we except the old heron who was no longer as smart as he had been in the days of his youth, and now stood on one leg as often as he did on two, and missed his stroke as often as he made it, Jock had no enemies in the water, and this is as it should have been, for there never was a more harmless little animal.