The Warden of the Sluice has agreed to a review of the older pondside records. He does not call it a review. He calls it “the clarification of a small matter of count,” and it proceeds at the pace that phrase implies, in the Clerk’s spare hours, at a tempo agreeable to a Warden who likes to leave things broadly alone. Work began Sunday afternoon. After a short negotiation, the conditions were settled as agreeable but not promising. The third drawer of the inkstand holds the old filings, kept for some seasons under waxed reed. It was opened on the Warden’s signal at a quarter past the second honk.
The purpose is to square two accounts. The Warden has long put his own tenure, with suitable modesty, at “several seasons more than would seem credible.” The long-resident frog, in this gazette of the twenty-ninth ultimo, put the present Warden as the fourth of his line. The Warden has not contested the frog’s arithmetic. He has observed, twice on Sunday, that the records “had not been kept with a view to settling questions of arithmetic,” and that any conclusion drawn from them would be drawn “with care.” The Clerk concurred.
The Deputy Weather-Instrument Keeper post is caught up in this. Advertised in this paper’s first classifieds on the twenty-first of April, and down to one tentative application as of last week, it will not be filled until the review yields a settled basis of precedent. That is one of the Warden’s phrases. The other is “the kind of clarity which, when one has it, one knows one has it.” The candidate has been told. Sources at the south reeds report him comfortable with the wait. He has brought a packed lunch.
The Clerk would not be drawn on any document yet retrieved. He allowed only, with the Warden’s nodded permission, that the third drawer held matters of two distinct sorts, kept in proximity for reasons it would not be useful to recall just now. Pressed, he turned over a piece of waxed reed. Further announcements would follow as they seemed warranted, he said. A soft honk went up from the reeds, by way of mild encouragement, and drew a look suggesting the Clerk had heard it.
Readers will learn of any item the review turns up that falls, in the Warden’s judgment, within the gazette’s legitimate concern. Items outside it will, he has indicated, “settle themselves, as such items tend to do.” The records are large. The Clerk’s spare hours are not. The season’s appropriate disposition, as the Warden said himself at the May Day address, is patience.