Friday’s heavy weather did less than the gloomier bulletins had warned. The reed beds are bent, and in places somewhat surprised, but essentially still standing. The eastern bank has been redrawn in a particular or two. The Warden of the Sluice, on a brief look, called the new arrangement “not, in the present view, unwelcome.” A small lily pad in the southern waters went under in the night. It had no relation to the great central pad, and its owners, by all reports, are taking the loss philosophically.
The morning’s real news came in two parts, neither of them expected before press. The first is the deputy of the Warden of the Sluice, returned at last. The deputy was last verified in the fog of the eleventh and not seen with confidence since. Shortly after first light the deputy turned up on the lee side of a substantial reed cluster on the north bank. And the deputy turned up holding, to the great relief of the Warden’s office, the principal humidity gauge. The gauge was in working order, and recording its first reading in fully thirteen days. That reading was taken yesterday evening at the height of the weather, the deputy insists. This paper will not be the one to argue.
The second part is the more remarkable. At some unestablished hour of the night, a novel object appeared on the north shore. What it is remains, as of this hour, undetermined. It is about the size of a small drake. The colour is a uniform dark. The texture is the trouble: firm under the Warden’s careful prod, then yielding under a longer one, which has so far told nobody anything except that it is an object that yields under a longer prod. It sits on the shoreline in a way that suggests it either drifted in with the storm or was set there by an agent none of those present can name. The Subcommittee has been notified. A small crowd has gathered, and the Clerk is holding it at a respectful distance, the respectful distance being, in the Clerk’s estimation, the only part of the morning fully under anyone’s control. Speculation, as is usual in these matters, is plentiful and at odds with itself.
Drake Halford of the east shore, asked his view, thought the object might be a piece of a boat. The dabchicks, asked apart, thought it nothing of the sort. The long-resident frog of the southern waters was up at the north shore for what he called a constitutional. He would not commit to a reading. He said only that he had been resident in the southern waters a long time, and had not, in that time, seen the like before. That is the sentence this paper sets down as the morning’s most instructive.
Of the heron, nothing further. A small party at the west pier reports seeing, late in the storm, what might have been the silhouette of a long-legged figure going north at a measured pace. The report comes without confirmation, and the party that filed it could not agree, afterward, on how much of it the weather had supplied. Whether a long-legged figure heading north has anything to do with an object washing up on the north shore is a question without an answer this morning. For now, it is one best left alone.
HONK, said the deputy, on being formally restored to her post; the gesture was taken for relief. The object has been notified, prodded, and surrounded. More to follow, if any of it can be made out.