ank into the water? I could see the sleek-coated fellow paddling about
close inshore. Then he dived down, and there were a lot of tiny bubbles
to show his course before he went right in under the bank, which was
full of holes.

I could almost fancy I was in the country, for there were a few rushes
and some sedgy growth close to where the rat had been busy. Farther
off, too, there was the sound that I had heard down in a marshy part of
Essex with my uncles, during one of our excursions. "_Quack, quack,
quack! Wuck, wuck, wuck_!"--a duck and a drake just coming down to the
water to drink and bathe and feed on the water-weed and snails.

Yes; it quite put me in mind of the country to have wild ducks coming
down to the pool, and--there were the two wild ducks! One, as the cry
had told me, was a drake, and he had once been white, but old age and
Arrowfield soot and the dirty little black yard where he generally lived
had changed his tint most terribly, and though he plunged in, and bobbed
and jerked the water all over his back, and rubbed the sides of his head
and his beak all among his feathers, they were past cleaning.

As to his wife, who expressed herself with a loud quack, instead of
saying _wuck, wuck_ in more smothered tones, she was possibly quite as
dirty as her lord, but being brown the dirt did not show. Her rags did,
for a more disreputable bird I never saw, though she, too, washed and
napped her wings, and dived and drenched herself before getting out on
the bank to preen and beak over her feathers.

Alas! As people say in books, it was not the country, but dingy,
smoke-bewithered Arrowfield, and I wondered to myself why a couple of
birds with wings should consent to stay amongst factories and works.

I knew the top of my float by heart; so must that skating spider which
had skimmed up to it, running over the top of the water as easily as if
it were so much ice. I was growing drowsy and tired. Certainly I
leaned my back up against the wall, but it was quite upright, and there
was no recompense. Whatever is the use of watching a float that will
not bob? It may be one of the best to be got in a tackle-shop, with a
lovely subdivision of the paint--blue at the bottom and white at the
top, or green and white, or blue and red, but if it obstinately persists
in sitting jauntily cocked up on the top of the water immovable, fishing
no longer becomes a sport.

But I did not fish all that time for nothing.