The post in the last week of summer came in with more weight than a week not hard on the heels of a Wednesday session of the Subcommittee usually carries. A fair sample runs below, the editor’s replies in brackets where a thing seemed to want clearing up. As this column has always done, the letters below are cut back where they ran on and, once or twice where the telling outran the likely, eased toward plausibility.
From a Resident of the Upper Bend, filed by the same uncertain means as the previous
Madam, I write to put right a small point on the lights, on which my last letter (see the seventeenth) gave the arrangement in the form the fishing party of mallards have set down in their own filings. Watched closely over a good many nights now, the arrangement is very slightly off the form the party gave. The gap between the second light and the third is, to my reading, a touch wider than the gap between the first and the second. The difference is small, but it holds across every night I have been about to watch, and I should like it recorded, for the gazette’s continuing care of the matter, in the form repeated watching has brought me to think the right one.
One further small note, which I would not raise but for the gazette’s plain interest in the parties at the upper bend. The frog, of whom your readers will know, has been by. He arrived; he stayed the spell the gazette has recorded elsewhere; he left. He did not, at any time during the visit, address me. I offer it only for the record, and not to invite any further asking of the frog, who has now, by my reading of your recent dispatch, said what he is for the present prepared to say.
A RESIDENT OF THE UPPER BEND
[The correction is accepted, with the thanks a clarification on a matter of standing interest is owed. The arrangement is recorded in the form the writer has given. The note on the frog’s visit is gratefully had. The editor will not turn it into an inquiry the frog has not himself asked for.]
From Mabel of the north bank, filed early on Friday morning
Madam, I write to confirm, with the editor’s leave and at the suggestion of the Clerk of the Cultural Subcommittee, that the matter of an informal gathering near the south reeds, of which the Clerk has been able to tell the gazette only in the most general way, may now be taken as settled. The gathering is to be a modest one. It is not, as I understand it, a programme. It is not, I am told, to fall under any Subcommittee oversight. My part in it is to be one piece, of a length and character the evening allows. I am grateful to have been thought of. Further particulars will follow in the Clerk’s customary way.
MABEL OF THE NORTH BANK
[The confirmation is gladly recorded. Readers will hear the further particulars as the customary parties give them out. The writer is wished well of her preparations.]
From the Drake Known as Reginald, filed at the customary hour from a position the editor declines to specify
Sir, I write on the season’s bread, on which the gazette has this summer been pleased to take what it called a position, and on which, to my mind, the matter is, the calming of recent weeks aside, not settled in the least. The Travelling Drake’s letter of the first was admirable. The gazette’s editorial of the same day was, with all due respect, rather less so. I will not go over the editorial at length. I will note only that the season has produced, by my own count and the counts of several parties whose counts I trust, no fewer than three distinct phases of crust inflation, of which the gazette has formally recorded two; and that a paper of this standing might, before the winter calls its attention elsewhere, take the trouble to record the third. The writer remains, as he was when last he wrote, not a registered name.
A DRAKE KNOWN AS REGINALD
[The editor accepts the broad spirit of the rebuke. The season’s third phase, if a third there was, fell in the stretch when the Subcommittee’s deferrals had, on a related matter, eaten more of these columns than the room really allowed. The writer’s continuing interest is noted, and will be kept in mind when the question is taken up again.]
Correspondence for these columns goes, as ever, honked roughly reedward. Each will be read out in full (ish) and answered around the third honk; the rest is held over until the summer is properly closed. The gazette closes its own this week, and means to do it properly.