The Footsteps at the Lock by Ronald A. Knox

The morning sun shone on the upper reaches of the Thames with the hazy glow that recalls a night of rain and presages a day of baking heat. It was early July, and the time of day conspired with the season of the year to produce an impression of almost uncanny perfection. The woods that threw out their flanking battalions towards the stream were heavy with consummated leafage; the hay standing in the fields glistened and steamed with the evaporations of yesterday; the larks sang in the unconscious egotism of their perpetual encore; the hedges were still fresh with the year's last revelation, the dog-rose; white wreaths of cloud sailed lazily across the distance, as if assured that they had no speaking part today. The cows stood whisking their tails gently, reserving themselves for greater efforts in the coming heat; rabbits sunned themselves among the hillocks, and scuttled away, stricken with imaginary fears; schoolchildren dotted the lanes, their heads together in earnest debate over nothing; the air was full of promise and expectation; a wind blew, steady but with no chill, from the southwest.

And through this world of loveliness the river flowed, a secret world of its own. Lower down, the Thames mingles with the haunts and the activities of men; overgrown towns straggle along its borders, Maidenhead, Reading, Henley, Wallingford, Abingdon. But here, in these upper waters, it is divorced from the companionship of human life; the villages stand to one side and let it pass, turning their backs on it contemptuously at half a mile's distance; nor is there any spot between Oxford and Lechlade at which a cluster of human habitations fringes the river's banks, and owes its conformation to the neighbourhood. Unexpectedly it glides at your feet, in the middle of smiling hayfields or at the corner of a country lane; it has a traffic and a life of its own. Cushioned upon its waters, in punt or canoe, you see nothing but high banks on each side, deep in willow-herb and loosestrife, in meadow-sweet and deadly nightshade; or a curtain of willows cuts off the landscape from you; or deep beds of reeds stand up like forests between you and the sky-horizon, to meet haymakers in a field, to pass under one of the rare, purposeless iron bridges, makes you feel as if you had intersected an altogether different plane of life. Your fellow-citizens are the fishermen, incorrigible optimists who line the banks at odd intervals; the encampments of boy scouts, mud-larking in the shallows or sunning themselves naked on the bank; your stages are the locks, your landscape the glassy surface and the tugging eddies of the stream.