Drake Halford of the east shore has filed again. On Tuesday morning he lodged a sixth filing in the Reed-Bed Subcommittee’s long review of how his household is to be classified. His patience in this business, by every record this paper has kept, now stands past any mark patience has reached at this pond before. He brought the filing to the Clerk’s office a little before the second honk, and the Clerk took it in the usual way. It runs to three leaves, both sides. By a fair margin it is the longest of the six he has put on the record.
What makes this one new is that it goes straight at the difficulty that has sat under the whole matter since spring. The first filing, lodged in proper form on the fifteenth of April, put the Halford household at four members. Every filing since has put it at five. That includes the fifth, lodged on the sixteenth of May, which the Subcommittee took up in special session a week later, on the twenty-third. The Subcommittee accepted it as “received and under review.” Five it was. The gap between the four and the five has been, since spring quietly noticed it, the one feature of the case no party would name aloud.
The sixth filing names it. It does so, the gazette is given to understand, in three sections. The first lists the household’s present membership by name, age, and station, and arrives at five with a precision the Clerk called, on receipt, “of a kind not often encountered in census matters at this pond.” That is high praise, in his line. The second section sets out, with due deference, how the first filing came to record four rather than five. Your correspondent has not seen that section in full and is, on the Clerk’s advice, not free to summarise it yet. The Clerk would say only that the account is “complete.” He left it there. The third section is a short addendum on a related question. It treats the present arithmetic of the household’s bread consumption, which Drake Halford has been heard to raise against the rising crust index (see the twentieth), and which the filing now writes formally into the record.
The Clerk was asked whether the sixth filing might settle the long-standing question. He said the Subcommittee’s procedures did not sort filings by how likely they were to settle anything. This one would be “considered in the same manner as those previously received.” So it goes. It went in under “Items of Continuing Interest.” That is the heading Halford’s filings have nearly always landed under, and the next regular session is expected to acknowledge it in the form such items get.
Drake Halford was asked at the end of his visit if he cared to make a public statement. He said he had said his piece in the three leaves. He was content to leave the matter with the Clerk for now, and meant, on his way home to the east shore, to stop a moment at the bank and consider the morning. He was seen to do it. He was in no hurry about it. Nor, so far as your correspondent will venture to read a drake, did he look disappointed.
The Household Adjoining the Halfords, whose whole contribution to date is a single remark, was not at the reeds and has not, the Clerk says, been heard from on the sixth filing. Whether the Household Adjoining will be moved to a position is a thing the gazette is content to wait on.
The matter stays, in the Clerk’s own words, “of continuing interest.”