From Streets of Birdsong.

She walked on. The sounds from the houses were now quieter, a clock alarm buzzing from a street side bedroom window, a dog barking at a nap interrupting cat, an infant announcing his hungry presence in the new day.

She followed the street and left the rows of houses, solitary houses now appeared, the tarmac pathway changed to a small track less well travelled, the traffic that had passed fast and anxious for the morning, thinned. From behind she heard the clip clop of a horse approaching. Instead of the mounted rider she was expecting a low flat hay cart passed her. The driver at the front was talking with three children who sat at the back facing towards her, legs dangling over the back of the cart, between the road and the see-sawing bogie. The fair haired boy in the middle waved at her, and shouted a greeting.

She walked on. Through a gate she saw a farmyard where a woman dressed in a long black dress stood scattering grain for squawking geese, nimble chickens and waddling ducks to squabble over.

A flighty pony, high stepping, quick and skittish, pulling a trap that contained a small whip cracking, YUP, YUP, shouting man passed her heading towards the town.

She followed a road that climbed up a steep narrow bridge and there she found the canal and the still-water and the locks and the tall black water-keeper gates with sluices that leaked bright, splashing streams to the water level below, and the swans, the water hens and the beds of green lilly pads with white flowers.

She sat on the raised grass bank beside the canal side walker's path.

A long, black, narrow barge puttered from the narrow upstream channel and into the harbour, and waited for the lock side keeper, in his black-grey suit, Fob and chain secured waistcoat and puffing pipe, beneath a thick grey moustache and a battered narrow brimmed hat, to winch the splashing, noisy, water into the lower trough, open the gates and then release the water, gates and barge into the lower stairwell of the canal, so that it could continue its journey.

Job completed the keeper returned to his green gated, rose-arched, cottage pathway, and stopped to remove his hat and mop his brow, checked his timepiece before entering the twilight interior to await another puttering summons.

She sat and drew and sketched, and peeled more paper and folder-stored her drawings while the sun climbed higher in the sky and filled the World behind her with brightness and in another time the hotel ended breakfast and prepared for lunch and Coughlan, the harassed hackney driver, roamed the lobby calling Miss Vig-noles, Miss Vig-noles, Dawson Court - Miss Vignoles.