Saturday evening had carry to it. Sunday morning had none. By first honk the pond looked, on this reporter’s assessment, no different from how it looked before the noises. The water was unmarked. The reeds were where they had been. The sluice gate stood where it has stood all season, in the position the Warden of the Sluice would call unaltered, if the Warden of the Sluice were present, which he was not. Damage reports were nil. Nerves, on which a reporter can be less certain, were mixed. That was the whole difference between the two evenings: nothing had broken, and not everyone was sure of it.
The long-resident frog of the southern waters had gone under at the first noise on Saturday and, so far as anyone this reporter asked could say, had not come up again before dark. He was back at his usual station beneath the second willow by about the third honk. He gave no sign of wishing to be approached. The second frog was at a respectful distance from him. This is the smaller frog of no particular acquaintance, resident in the southern waters since the morning of the twenty-second of June, the one who took shelter under the easternmost candidate pad while the noises ran. No finding has issued on what passes between the two frogs, and there is none to issue: no formal statement has been made about the smaller frog’s relationship to the long-resident one, and this paper does not supply what the frogs have not. He neither asked after the evening’s events, by any visible sign, nor alluded to them. The arrangement looked settled.
The dabchicks of the west pier held the formation they took up at the first noise. By the small evidence available, they had not shifted it between then and Sunday morning. The eldest of the dabchicks was at the seaward end by about the second honk, at the station lately her own. No statement was issued. Whether Saturday’s composition had been written for issue and then held back, or written so as never to be issued at all, is not a thing the present evidence can determine.
The heron was not visible at the west pier on Sunday morning. The bird has not been at its station since Thursday afternoon. Whether Saturday’s noises bear on the absence, or whether the absence belongs to the pattern this paper has tracked since the third, is the kind of question the pond does not, this season, care to be asked. The gazette will not say whether the bird is the same bird, either. It never has.
Drake Halford was at the east shore by about the fourth honk, taking his usual turn at the bend. This reporter crossed the channel to reach him. The noises, he gave every indication, had been judged on the east shore regrettable but not alarming. He put it this way, taken down as near to verbatim as the gosling at the next reed would permit:
“We have had louder. We have had nearer. We have had, though not on this occasion, both.”
The Household Adjoining did not appear at any point while this reporter watched. The older drakes were where Sunday in this season finds them, at the west end of the south bank, in positions indistinguishable from the Sunday before. What little of their talk carried held the word “Saturday” once and the word “well” three times. They were not assigning blame. On the showing available, they were not assigning anything.
So the pond is in tolerable order, all things weighed. The boundary hedge has not repeated itself. The matter goes to the next Subcommittee session, where it will, on every precedent, sit, be considered, and join the queue of things deferred. The noises were the loudest event of the week. The deferral will be the most predictable.