Volume One—Chapter Seven.
Sir James Catches Cold in the Back.
“And are there any fish in that muddy pond, Monnick?” said Arthur Prayle that morning after breakfast.
“Oh, sir, yes; you should see them sometimes; great fellows that come up after the bread you throw in. Are you coming to see it emptied?”
Arthur Prayle looked at his glossy black garments, and then, bowing his head, gravely said, “Yes, perhaps I shall be there,” and he raised his book and went on down the garden.
His “perhaps” proved a certainty, for when the party started from the house to go across the fields he walked sedately between Aunt Sophia and Naomi, talking softly all the time till they reached the place.
It was a large pond. How large? Well, about as big as ponds generally are; and it was pretty deep. There were mysterious places beneath the overhanging willows, whose roots hung in the water, where the hooked fish rushed and entangled the lines. There was that awkward spot where the old posts, and wood, and willow poles lay with their ends in the mud, where Sir James caught the great eel that twined himself in and out, and the stout silkworm gut line parted like tinder. There was a deep hole, too, by the penstock, and various linking places where, in the silence of the night, you could hear wallowings and splashings, and now and then a loud suck or smack of the lips as a fish took something from the top of the water.
On inspection half-a-dozen brawny brown-armed men were found picking and throwing out the earth, and graving a trench in a way that would have made a military engineer long for a few hundred of such fellows to form his earthworks. Deep down they delved till they had cut and laid bare certain pipes in a huge dyke, every foot of which was suggestive of the mysteries of the pond that required so vast a trench to drain off its waters. There was a good deal of speculation rife about that pond, inasmuch as one that was drained by Sir James a couple of years before proved to hold nothing but thousands of great fat newts that swarmed over the mud like alligators in a Florida lagoon. It was said that after all perhaps a carp or two and an eel would be all that were found, but, even as the speculative remarks were made, a shoal of small roach flecked the surface, and it was certain that the result could not be nil.
It boots not to tell of the way those men worked, as full of interest in the job as any one else, it is enough to say that the pond head was reached at last, the new drain ready, and over the pipe a piece of wire-work placed to stay any fish from passing down; and at last the water was allowed to flow till the pond was a couple of feet lower, the roots of the bank vegetation and the willows bare, and dozens of slimy holes visible, such as would be affected by eels, water-voles, and other lovers of such snuggeries in the banks. Ragged pieces of wood stood out at all angles from the mud and water, the penstock rose up like a model in old oak of Tyburn Tree, kept for the execution of rats; and the great wooden pump, with its platform in the corner where the water-barrels were tilled, trailed its leaden pipe down into the depths like a monstrous antediluvian eel.