FullReads

“It’s for the angling competition,” she said.

We said, “What’s that?”

“Why,” she said, slicing cucumber like beautiful machinery while she said it, “a lot of anglers come down some particular day and fish one particular bit of the river. And the one that catches most fish gets the prize. They’re fishing the pen above Stoneham Lock. And they all come here to dinner. So I’ve got my hands full and a trifle over.”

We said, “Couldn’t we help?”

But she said, “Oh no, thank you. Indeed not, please. I really am so I don’t know which way to turn. Do run along, like dears.”

So we ran along like these timid but graceful animals.

Need I tell the intellectual reader that we went straight off to the pen above Stoneham Lock to see the anglers competing? Angling is the same thing as fishing.

I am not going to try and explain locks to you. If you’ve never seen a lock you could never understand even if I wrote it in words of one syllable and pages and pages long. And if you have, you’ll understand without my telling you. It is harder than Euclid if you don’t know beforehand. But you might get a grown-up person to explain it to you with books or wooden bricks.

I will tell you what a pen is because that is easy. It is the bit of river between one lock and the next. In some rivers “pens” are called “reaches,” but pen is the proper word.

We went along the towing-path; it is shady with willows, aspens, alders, elders, oaks and other trees. On the banks are flowers–yarrow, meadow-sweet, willow herb, loose-strife, and lady’s bed-straw. Oswald learned the names of all these trees and plants on the day of the picnic. The others didn’t remember them, but Oswald did. He is a boy of what they call relenting memory.

The anglers were sitting here and there on the shady bank among the grass and the different flowers I have named. Some had dogs with them, and some umbrellas, and some had only their wives and families.

We should have liked to talk to them and ask how they liked their lot, and what kinds of fish there were, and whether they were nice to eat, but we did not like to.

Denny had seen anglers before and he knew they liked to be talked to, but though he spoke to them quite like to equals he did not ask the things we wanted to know. He just asked whether they’d had any luck, and what bait they used.

And they answered him back politely. I am glad I am not an angler. It is an immovable amusement, and, as often as not, no fish to speak of after all.

Daisy and Dora had stayed at home: Dora’s foot was nearly well, but they seem really to like sitting still. I think Dora likes to have a little girl to order about. Alice never would stand it. When we got to Stoneham Lock, Denny said he should go home and fetch his fishing-rod. H. O. went with him. This left four of us–Oswald, Alice, Dicky, and Noel. We went on down the towing-path.

The lock shuts up (that sounds as if it was like the lock on a door, but it is very otherwise) between one pen of the river and the next; the pen where the anglers were was full right up over the roots of the grass and flowers.

But the pen below was nearly empty.

“You can see the poor river’s bones,” Noel said.

And so you could.

Stones and mud and dried branches, and here and there an old kettle or a tin pail with no bottom to it, that some bargee had chucked in.

From walking so much along the river we knew many of the bargees. Bargees are the captains and crews of the big barges that are pulled up and down the river by slow horses. The horses do not swim. They walk on the towing-path, with a rope tied to them, and the other end to the barge. So it gets pulled along. The bargees we knew were a good friendly sort, and used to let us go all over the barges when they were in a good temper. They were not at all the sort of bullying, cowardly fiends in human form that the young hero at Oxford fights a crowd of, single-handed, in books.