ith it stones, sticks, peat-water, addle grouse-eggs
and drowned kingfishers, fertilising salts and vegetable poisons--
not, alas! without a large crust, here and there, of sheer froth.
Yet no heterogeneous confused flood-deposit, no fertile meadows
below. And no high water, no fishing. It is in the long black
droughts, when the water is foul from lowness, and not from height,
that Hydras and Desmidiae, and Rotifers, and all uncouth pseud-
organisms, bred of putridity, begin to multiply, and the fish are
sick for want of a fresh, and the cunningest artificial fly is of no
avail, and the shrewdest angler will do nothing--except with a gross
fleshly gilt-tailed worm, or the cannibal bait of roe, whereby
parent fishes, like competitive barbarisms, devour each other's
flesh and blood--perhaps their own. It is when the stream is
clearing after a flood, that the fish will rise. . . . When will
the flood clear, and the fish come on the feed again?

Next; I shall be blamed for having left untold the fate of those
characters who have acted throughout as Lancelot's satellites. But
indeed their only purpose consisted in their influence on his
development, and that of Tregarva; I do not see that we have any
need to follow them farther. The reader can surely conjecture their
history for himself. . . . He may be pretty certain that they have
gone the way of the world . . . abierunt ad plures . . . for this
life or for the next. They have done--very much what he or I might
have done in their place--nothing. Nature brings very few of her
children to perfection, in these days or any other. . . . And for
Grace, which does bring its children to perfection, the quantity and
quality of the perfection must depend on the quantity and quality of
the grace, and that again, to an awful extent--The Giver only knows
to how great an extent--on the will of the recipients, and therefore
in exact proportion to their lowness in the human scale, on the
circumstances which environ them. So my characters are now--very
much what the reader might expect them to be. I confess them to be
unsatisfactory; so are most things: but how can I solve problems
which fact has not yet solved for me? How am I to extricate my
antitypal characters, when their living types have not yet
extricated themselves? When the age moves on, my story shall move
on with it. Let it be enough, that my puppets have retreated in
good orde