Monday at the pond was quiet. The quiet arrived by no arrangement of anyone’s, and it is the present job of this dispatch only to note it, not to explain it. The water was still. The reeds were still. The bread queue at the East Bank approach ran, at first honk, to a length the older drakes would call unremarkable and this paper, taking the longer view, calls the shortest since early spring. Nothing of consequence was filed at the reeds before the third honk. Very little after.
The Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee, met at the usual hours, was moving a small quantity of paper from one pigeonhole to another. The direction read, to an eye that has watched enough Clerk’s offices, as no direction of any urgency. Asked whether anything had been lodged for Wednesday’s session, the Clerk allowed that two or three items had. None of them, in his characterisation, would have been minuted any differently for having been lodged on a quiet Monday rather than a busy one. That is the best account of the morning the gazette can give, and it gives it as the Clerk gave it.
A drake of no particular acquaintance was at the lily pads around the fourth honk, working a slow and deliberate circuit of the southern waters at a pace that suggested either a constitutional or nothing else to do. He finished the circuit, paused at the western pad, looked over the southern flat, and carried on toward the east shore at the same unhurried rate. The southern waters reported no further movement of note before the sixth honk.
The Subcommittee will meet, as it meets, on Wednesday. The matters before it will be the matters a quiet Monday produces. Readers wanting a fuller account of Friday’s special session are sent to Sunday’s bulletin, which stays, for now, the most consequential thing filed here in some weeks.
A slow day, then, and slow days are also part of the record.