The inspection of the object on the north shore resumed at first light on Tuesday, the tide having released it. Conditions were, the Warden said afterward, “more conducive to close examination than had been the case the previous afternoon, though only somewhat.” In due course, and with the appropriate caution, a determination was reached.
The object is a section of waterlogged sycamore branch. The Warden has confirmed it. It is the sort of thing frequently found along the shores after heavy weather, and of no particular distinction. It runs to about the length of a small drake. The dark, uniform colour is the work of long immersion, and the saturation was complete enough that on Saturday morning, and for several mornings after, nobody recognised a piece of tree in it. The Warden’s full statement, which the deputy was careful to transcribe in its entirety, reads: “It is a piece of branch. It has been in the water. It is now on the shore. The matter is concluded.”
The inspection had not been preparing itself to receive that. A pause of several seconds followed. Then came a low, general murmur the Clerk has since called “in the nature of a collective adjustment.” Drake Halford, who had committed the day before to the boat-fragment theory, took the correction with the dignity for which he is increasingly noted. The faction of less coherent membership, which had held the object to be a piece of something else, said nothing, on the general feeling that nothing was now required.
The long-resident frog, who had earlier declined a view pending further information, was approached at the close of the morning for what now amounted to a position. He considered the question. He observed the branch from two short hops’ distance. Then he remarked: “It is the kind of branch I had supposed it might be, in the broad sense, though I had not been prepared to commit to the species in advance.” This correspondent took that for a position, and is recording it as one.
Two new factions have, predictably, formed. One holds, with some warmth, that the matter was concluded too quickly and wants more examination. The other holds that it was concluded too slowly, and that examination ought, in future, to begin with the most prosaic explanation and not labour toward it. The Warden has indicated, in the strongest terms a Warden has available, that the Warden will entertain neither. The Subcommittee, asked for a position, declined one. In the Clerk’s careful phrasing, the matter was no longer of a character that required a Subcommittee.
A note is owed to those readers who, over the past several days, built private speculations of real elaboration around the object. This paper acknowledges them, thought many of them thoughtful, and offers the flatness of their conclusion not as a rebuke but as an instructive instance of the form. It is rare, in pondside affairs, for a thing to turn out to be exactly the thing it most prosaically appears to be. That it has, this once, is to be welcomed, and noted, and gently absorbed. The branch will be left where it lies. It is expected to settle its own affairs with the next high tide.