DISPATCHES
The fishing party of mallards at the upper bend has filed a formal report at the Clerk's office: three lights, seen at the bend on the evening of the twenty-second. The Subcommittee has been told. The matter is deferred pending further word. The gazette offers no explanation, because it has none.
FROM THE POND
Friday on the south bank, and nothing happened worth the name. The older drakes took the day. The heron held. The breeze never came. A quiet day, filed quietly.
LETTERS
Three letters following Wednesday's session of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee. The Junior Member writes briefly, the eldest of the dabchicks ventures her household's most direct enquiry to date, and an anonymous correspondent, signing with a small drawing of a leaf, asks that certain matters be left alone.
DISPATCHES
Wednesday's Reed-Bed Subcommittee took up the third conditions report from the Deputy of the Sluice and deferred it, as it has deferred the matter before. This time, though, the minute of the deferral departed from the customary form, and tied the deferral to the Warden himself.
FROM THE POND
A second warm day on the south bank, and the older drakes gave the better part of an hour at the western station to settling something. A watcher caught three words of it and made out none. By long usage, no one was going to catch more.
EDITORIAL
The crust index has risen three weeks running and stands at nine to the hour at the East Bank on Wednesday, its highest since the late-spring calming. The question goes, for the first time, to the Clerk of the Exchequer, who declines to have a position.
FROM THE POND
The warmth ran the south bank on Sunday and everything on it deferred to the heat; the older drakes voted with their feet for the willow's shade, the heron held the west pier, the frogs kept to the depths, and the afternoon produced, at length, nothing.