Fifteen gentle stories that stay close to water, told in a soft Scottish voice: a long May morning on a trout stream, a girl who is kind to a stranger at a spring, a well at the edge of an English wood, a bridge of fishes across a Korean sea, a robe of feathers found on a pine shore, and the star-lovers who meet once a year across the river of heaven. Each story is a little slower, and a little simpler, than the one before, until the last few are hardly stories at all: the sea wind on the chalk hills, and a quiet pond that keeps a man company through the evening.
The stories
- 1:28 The Riverside Inn and the Evening Song 12 min
- 14:57 The Fountain in the Beech Wood 11 min
- 27:34 The Well That Remembers Every Face 11 min
- 40:09 The Child the River Brought 12 min
- 53:35 The Queen Who Remembered How to Laugh 13 min
- 1:07:27 The Ship That Is Always Coming 13 min
- 1:21:17 The Feather Robe in the Pine 12 min
- 1:34:53 The Fish Who Chose Another Water 12 min
- 1:48:35 The Wise Angler and the Small Fish of the Morning River 12 min
- 2:01:48 The Kestrel on the Clock Tower 13 min
- 2:16:16 The Bird Who Would Not Dig the Stream 12 min
- 2:29:44 The Twin Pines and the Moon-Road 11 min
- 2:42:26 The Young Gull and the Net-Mender 12 min
- 2:56:02 The Bridge of Joy Birds 11 min
- 3:08:36 The Hermit, the Heron, and the Gentle Rain 13 min
Retold from
- English Fairy Tales, collected by Joseph Jacobs
- Japanese Fairy Tales, by Grace James
- Japanese Fairy World, by William Elliot Griffis
- Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling
- Korean Fairy Tales, by William Elliot Griffis
- Old Deccan Days, collected by Mary Frere
- Old Peter's Russian Tales, by Arthur Ransome
- The Blue Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang
- The Book of Nature Myths, by Florence Holbrook
- The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton
- The Life of the Fields, by Richard Jefferies
- Walden, by Henry David Thoreau