THE FILLING OF THE THAMES.
THEE'VE got no water in 'ee, and if 'ee don't fillee avore New Year, 'ee'll be no more good for a stree-um"! Thus briefly, to Father Thames, the shepherd of Sinodun Hill. He had pitched his float into the pool below the weir —the pool which lies in the broad, flat fields, with never a house in sight but the lockman's cottage—and for the first time on a Saturday evening's fishing he saw his bait go clear to the bottom instead of being lost to sight instantly in the boiling water of the weir-pool. He could even see the broken piles and masses of concrete which the river in its days of strength had torn up and scattered on the bottom, and among them the shoals of fat river fish eyeing his worm as critically as his master would a sample of most inferior oats. Yet the pool was beautiful to look upon. Where the water had sunk the rashes had grown taller than ever, and covered the little sandbanks left by the ebbing river with a forest of green and of red gold, where the frost had laid its finger on them. In the back eddies and shallows the dying lily leaves covered the surface with scales of red and copper, and all along the banks teazles and frogbits, and brown and green reeds, and sedges of bronze and russet, made a ruddy screen, through which the black and white moorhens popped in and out, while the water-rats, now almost losing the aquatic habit, and becoming pedestrian, sat peeling rushes with their teeth, and eyeing the shepherd on the weir. Even the birds seemed to have voted that the river was never going to fill again, for a colony of sandpipers, instead of con- tinuing their migration to the coast, had taken up their quarters on the little spits of mud and shingle now fringing the weir-pool, and were flitting from point to point, and making believe it was a bit of Pagham Harbour or Porchester Creek. On every sunny morning monster spiders ran out from the holes and angles of the weir-frame, and spun mighty webs across and across the straddling iron legs below the foot- bridge, right down to the lowered surface of the water, which bad so sunk that each spider had at least four feet more of web than he could have reckoned upon before, and waxed fat on the produce of the added superficies of enmeshed and immolated flies. So things went on almost till New Year's Eve. The flats of the Upper Thames, where the floods get out up the ditches and tributaries, and the wild duck gather on the shallow " splashes " and are stalked with the stalking-horse as of old, were as sound and dry as Richmond Park, and sounded hollow to the foot, instead of wheezing like a sponge. The herons could not find a meal on a hundred acres of meadow, which
even a frog found too dry for' him, and the little brooks and land-springs which came down through them to the big river were as low as in June, as clear as a Hampshire chalk stream, and as full of the submerged life of plants. Instead of dying with the dying year at the inrush of cold water brought by autumn rains, all the creases, and tresses, and stars, and tangles, and laced sprays of the miniature growth of the springs and running brooks were as bright as malachite, though embedded in a doable line of dead white shivering sedge. And thus the shortest day went by, and still the fields lay dry, and the river shrank, and the fish were off the feed ; and though murky vapours hung over the river and the flats and shut out the sun, the long-ex- pected rains fell not until the last week's end of the year. Then at last signs and tokens began by which the knowing ones prophesied that there was " something the matter with the weather." The sheep fed as if they were not to have another bite for a week, and bleated without ceasing, strange birds flew across the sky in hurrying flocks, and in all the country houses and farmers' balls the old-fashioned barometers, with their dials almost as big as our eight-day clocks and pointers as long as a knitting-needle, began to fall, or rather to go backwards, further than was ever recorded. And whereas it is, and always has been, a fact well known to the owners of these barometers that if they are tapped violently in the centre of their mahogany stomachs the needle will jerk a little in the direction of recovery, and is thereby believed to exercise a controlling influence in the direction of better weather, the more the barometers were tapped and thumped the more the needle edged backwards, till in some cases it went down till it pointed to the ivory star at the very bottom of the dial, and then struck work and stuck there.
That night the storm began. To connoisseurs in weather in the meteorological sense it was a joy and an ensample, for it was a perfect cyclonic storm, exactly the right shape, with all its little dotted lines of " isobars " running in ovals one inside another. From another point of view it was the storm of an hour spread over two days, so that there was plenty of time to see and remember the normal ways of cyclones, which may be briefly described as first a flush of heat whether in summer or winter, then a furious wind, then hurrying clouds and much rain, with changes of wind, then more clouds and more rain, then a "clearing shower" with most rain, then a furling and brailing- up of the rain clouds, splashes of blue in the sky, with nets of scud crossing them, sudden gleams of sun, sudden cold, and perhaps a hail shower, and then piercing cold and sunlight. All which things happened, but took a long time about it. The storm began in the night, and howled through the dark. The rain came with the morning ; but it was the "clearing shower," which lasted ten hours, which caused the filling of the Thames. The wind still blew in furious gusts, but the rain was almost " too heavy to be moved." The sky was one dark sombre cloud, and from this the rain poured in slanting lines like pencils of water. But across this blanket of cloud came darker, lower, and wetter clouds, even more surcharged with water, from which the deluge poured till the earth was white like glass with the spraying drops. Out in the fields it was impossible to see through the rain ; but as the end of the column of cloud began to break and widen the water could be seen in the act of passing from the land to the river. On the fields and under the fences all the surface earth was beaten down or swept away. All seeds which bad sunk naturally below the surface were laid bare. Hundreds of sprouting horse chestnuts, of sprouting acorns beneath the trees, thousands of grains of fallen wheat and barley, of beans, and other seeds of the farm were uncovered as if by a spade.
Down every furrow, drain, watercourse, ditch, runnel, and watercut, the turbid waters were hurrying, all with one common flow, all with increasing speed, to the Thames. The sound of waters filled the air, dropping, poppling, splashing, trickling, dripping from leaves to earth, falling from bank to rills below, gurgling under gate-paths, lapping against the tree-trunks and little ridge piles in the brooks, and at last sweeping with a hushed content into the bosom of Thames. And the river himself was good for something more than a " stree-um." He was bank full and sweeping on, taking to himself on this side and on that the tributes of his children, from which the waters poured so fast that they came in almost clear, and the mingled waters in the river were scarcely clouded in their flow. The linkmen rose by night and looked at the climbing flood, and wakened their wives and children, and raised in haste hatch after hatch of the weirs, and threw open locks and gates. Windsor Weir broke, but the wires flashed the news on, and the river's course was open, and after the greatest rain-storm and the lowest barometer known for thirty years, the Thames was not in flood, but only brimful ; and once more a "river of waters."
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