It was a week with nothing in it but the lights at the upper bend, still appearing, and the post still came in heavier than a quieter season would have managed. A fair sample runs below. Where a thing wanted clearing up, the editor has put a reply in brackets and said so. Letters in this column are shortened where they ran long and, on the odd occasion the pond’s belief wants steadying, set straight for plausibility.
From a Resident of the Upper Bend, filed by means uncertain at the reeds
Madam, I write on the matter of the lights, which the gazette has lately gone to some trouble to record without committing itself either to an explanation or to the refusal of one. I have lived a long while at the part of the pond the lights are seen from, and I know its conditions as a bird does who has watched them over more seasons than anyone at the southern end could trouble to count. So I can tell the gazette what may be of use to its continuing record. It is this.
The lights have come on every clear night since the meteor shower of the twelfth and thirteenth. They come in the arrangement the fishing party of mallards have set down in their reports: three lights, small and steady, at the spacing the party gave, at the height the party gave. They do not come on the nights the cloud sits heavy. They are not, to the eye of anyone up here who can make the comparison, the Perseids. Their reflection is not a reflection of the Perseids either. And the explanation the older drakes of the south bank are said to favour does not hold up at the upper bend itself.
I write, last, to say the gazette’s reluctance to settle on an explanation is, for whatever one bird’s view is worth, the wise course. On the evidence so far this is not a matter on which an explanation can responsibly be put. It is a matter on which the arrangement can be reported, the recurrence recorded, and the deeper inquiry left to such authority as the pond, in its own time, finds it can bring.
A RESIDENT OF THE UPPER BEND
[The writer’s local knowledge is acknowledged with thanks. The matter stays under observation. The editor is grateful for the care shown, and welcomes any further word the writer cares to send.]
From the Junior Member of the Subcommittee, filed at the customary hour
Sir, a brief line to thank your correspondent for the dispatch from the upper bend filed on the eighth, which I read with interest and have, by your leave, kept for my own records. The correspondent’s care in separating what could be seen that night from what could not is the sort of care that ought to recommend itself to anyone taking the matter up. The Subcommittee will come back to the question in due course. I do not expect it to come back in any hurry.
A JUNIOR MEMBER
[The thanks are accepted, and the dispatch is glad to have proved useful. The Subcommittee’s likely pace is recorded with the usual calm.]
Anonymous, filed at the reeds without signature
Has the gazette considered the obvious?
(a small mark of three short parallel lines, with perhaps a fourth fainter one beneath; the editor sets the description down so no one is confused by it later)
[The editor has, for now, no view on what the writer holds the obvious to be. The mark is given here in the editor’s own description, as near as this paper’s means allow. The line is held over against whatever the writer cares to send next.]
Letters meant for print may be honked toward the reeds at large. The editor will get through each one, more or less in full, and reply by roughly the third honk. Anything further keeps until the season has shut up shop. The lights, in the meantime, go on without us.