The warmth had been building since the close of last week, and by Sunday afternoon it ran the south bank from edge to edge. On Saturday the Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice had recorded it as eleven drakes at the principal humidity gauge. By mid-afternoon it declined to be hurried in any direction at all. Your correspondent took up the usual point a little east of the older drakes’ western station. The drakes were not at the station. They had shifted some four wing-spans south, into a small shade the great willow let down at that hour. It is the first season they have judged the shade necessary. They have weighed the matter for more seasons than this paper can count, and they have now, on the evidence, arrived at the number that settles it.
The water at the south bank was warm. It has been warm for days. By late afternoon the warmth had gone perfectly still, and the older drakes named that stillness the principal feature of the season, not in words but by moving to the shade. The light was strong and not unkind. The reeds did not stir. What breeze there was came from no direction a bird could name.
The long-resident frog of the southern waters did not show at the surface the whole afternoon. In the warm hours he keeps to the depths; coming up is a matter for the cool of the evening. This is his summer habit, not an absence. The frog presently resident in the southern waters, lately the subject of some notice in these pages, likewise stayed under. The gazette notes it and reads nothing into it, except that whatever the arrangement is between the two of them, the arrangement holds.
The family of dabchicks of the west pier had not surfaced for some hours by the time the pier came into view. In late summer that is the pattern, and the household’s hour below is, to everyone’s contentment, the household’s own affair. The eldest of the dabchicks, lately the family’s voice at the pier, was not in evidence either. Nor were the fish.
The heron stood at the west pier. It held the position it has held, with the small interruptions regular readers will recall, since the twentieth of May. It had not moved under the watch. This paper did not approach.
Near the fifth honk of the afternoon the older drakes resumed the low conversation that is their season’s work at this station. Three fragments carried this far. The word “warm,” twice. The words “as I recall,” once. And then, at the end of what sounded like a longer argument, the verdict: “well, that is the difference.” The difference went unrecorded here, there being no way to tell which two things were being compared. The difference, by the drakes’ agreement, was settled, and the south bank lay in the heat and let it be.