plenty to see and learn, or in the floods, when the water roars through
the lifted hatches and the rush of the river throbs across the misty
flats, and the weeds and sedges smell rank as the stream stews them in its
mash-tub in the pool below the weir.

[1] Phillips, "Geology of Oxford and of the Valley of the Thames."




THE FILLING OF THE THAMES


In the late autumn of 1893, one of the driest years ever known, I went to
the weir pool above the wood, and found the shepherd fishing. The river
was lower than had ever been known or seen, and on the hills round the
"dowsers" had been called in with their divining rods to find the vanished
waters.

"Thee've got no water in 'ee, and if 'ee don't fill'ee avore New Year,
'ee'll be no more good for a stree-um"! Thus briefly, to Father Thames,
the shepherd of Sinodun Hill. He had pitched his float into the pool below
the weir--the pool which lies in the broad, flat fields, with scarce a
house in sight but the lockman's cottage--and for the first time on a
Saturday's fishing he saw his bait go clear to the bottom instead of being
lost to view instantly in the boiling water of the weir-pool. He could
even see the broken piles and masses of concrete which the river in its
days of strength had torn up and scattered on the bottom, and among them
the shoals of fat river fish eyeing his worm as critically as his master
would a sample of most inferior oats. Yet the pool was beautiful to look