He sat down himself and waited patiently. It satisfied his nature with an ineffable satisfaction to watch that steady flow of the brown water, gurgling round the willow-roots and the muddy concavities of the bank. He felt glad that the Lunt, where he was now watching it, had left the town behind and was now to meet with nothing else really contaminating until it mingled with the Bristol Channel. He had already begun to feel a peculiar personal friendliness toward this patient muddy stream; and it gave him pleasure to think that its troubles were really over, when itself might so easily be fearing another Blacksod somewhere between these green meadows and the salt sea to which it ran! Looking quite as intently at these brown waters as Gerda herself was doing, it occurred to him how different a thing the personality of a river is from the personality of a sea. The water of the sea, though broken up into tides and waves, really remains the same identical mass of waters; whereas the water of a river is at every succeeding moment a completely different body. No particles of it are ever the same, unless they get waylaid in some side-stream or ditch or weir.