The Fortunes of Oliver Horn

Brookfield village lay in a great wide meadow through which strayed one of Moose Hillock's lost brooks -- a brook tired out with leaping from bowlder to bowlder and taking headers into deep pools, and plunging down between narrow walls of rock. Here in the meadow it caught its breath and rested, idling along, stopping to bathe a clump of willows; whispering to the shallows; laughing gently with another brook that had locked arms with it, the two gossiping together under their breath as they floated on through the tall grasses fringing the banks, or circled about the lily-pads growing in the eddies. In the middle of the meadow, just where two white ribbons of roads crossed, was a clump of trees pierced by a church-spire. Outside of this bower of green -- a darker green than the velvet meadow-grass about it -- glistened the roofs and windows of the village houses.

All this Oliver saw, at a distance, from the top of the stage.