upon. Where the water had sunk the rushes had grown taller than ever, and
covered the little sandbanks left by the ebbing river with a forest of
green and of red gold, where the frost had laid its finger on them. In the
back eddies and shallows the dying lily leaves covered the surface with
scales of red and copper, and all along the banks teazles and frogbits,
and brown and green reeds, and sedges of bronze and russet, made a screen,
through which the black and white moorhens popped in and out, while the
water-rats, now almost losing the aquatic habit, and becoming pedestrian,
sat peeling rushes with their teeth, and eyeing the shepherd on the weir.
Even the birds seemed to have voted that the river was never going to fill
again, for a colony of sandpipers, instead of continuing their migration
to the coast, had taken up their quarters on the little spits of mud and
shingle now fringing the weir-pool, and were flitting from point to point,
and making believe it was a bit of Pagham Harbour or Porchester Creek. On
every sunny morning monster spiders ran out from the holes and angles of
the weir-frame, and spun webs across and across the straddling iron legs
below the footbridge, right down to the lowered surface of the water,
which had so sunk that each spider had at least four feet more of web than
he could have reckoned upon before and waxed fat on the produce of the
added superficies of enmeshed and immolated flies. So things went on
almost till New Year's Eve. The flats of the Upper Thames, where the
floods get out up the ditches and tributaries, and the wild duck gather on
the shallow "splashes" and are stalked with the stalking-horse as of old,
were as dry as Richmond Park, and sounded hollow to the foot, instead of
wheezing like a sponge. The herons could not find a meal on a hundred
acres of meadow, which even a frog found too dry for him, and the little
brooks and land-springs which came down through them to the big river were
as low as in June, as clear as a Hampshire chalk stream, and as full of
the submerged life of plants. Instead of dying with the dying year at the
inrush of cold water brought by autumn rains, all the cresses, and