Now the water had dropped back, and dry sticks lodged on the branches marked the top of the flood. The river flowed slowly through the pool, a-glimmer with the clear green western sky. At the tail of the pool it murmured against the stones, and quickened into paws of water, with star-streaming claws ; the jets and rills ran shallow and fast to an island, on which grew a leaning willow tree. Below the island the river moved swift and polished, blurred under its broken banks by the alders and sallows laden with damp nests of flood-sticks. Round a bend it hastened, musical over many stretches of shillet; at the end of the bend it merged into a dull silence of deep saltwater, and its bright spirit was lost. The banks below were mud, channered by the sluices of guts draining the marsh. Every twelve hours the sea passed an arm under Halfpenny Bridge, a minute's heron-flight below, and the spring tides felt the banks as far as the bend. The water moved down again immediately, for the tide’s-head had no rest.
The tree lay black in the glimmering salmon pool. Over the meadow a mist was moving, white and silent as the fringe of down on the owl's feathers. Since the fading of shadows it had been straying from the wood beyond the mill-leat, bearing in its breath the scents of the day, when bees had bended bluebell and primrose. Now the bees slept, and mice were running through the flowers. Over the old years’ leaves the vapour moved, silent and wan, the wraith of waters once filling the ancient wide river-bed—men say that the sea’s tides covered all this land,
4
