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Updated: June 15, 2025
She found herself liking Jimmy amazingly . . . The hands of the clock pointed to three minutes to the hour. Porters skimmed to and fro like water-beetles. "I can't explain," said Jimmy. "It wasn't temporary insanity; it was necessity." "Very good, Mr. James. I think you had better be taking your seat now." "Quite right, I had. It would spoil the whole thing if they left me behind.
And I love also the flora of the meadows: the meadow-sweet swayed by the breezes, rocked by the murmur of the brook. Its perfumed crown is adorned like the water-beetles, more iridescent than the throats of humming-birds. It is the beloved of the greensward, the bride of the grassy borders. But it is in the deep recesses of old deserted parks that the plants are most mysterious.
To lie still over the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling and the sculpins gliding busily and silently beneath the boat, to rustle in through the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil creek, to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean, lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor in the Desert could not seem more remote from life, the cool breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against the half- sunken pillars, why should I tell of these things, that I should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened with boats as with a swarm of water-beetles?
The sameness of fresh-water productions all over the globe is not confined to animal life, but extends to plants also. Alphonse de Candolle has remarked that in large groups of plants which have many terrestrial and only a few aquatic species the latter have a far wider distribution than the former. D. Sharp informs me that water-beetles undoubtedly present the same types all over the world.
Here and there at the foot of the steps rocked gaudy barges, a mass of gilding and colour, with broad low canopies at the stern, and flags drooping at the prow; wherries moved to and fro, like water-beetles, shooting across from bank to bank with passengers, above and below the palace, or pausing with uplifted oars as the stream swept them down, for the visitors to stare and marvel at the great buildings.
In a few steps we were stopped by a channel of clear water, with tiny fish and water-beetles in it; and, looking round, saw that the whole lake was intersected with channels, so unlike anything which can be seen elsewhere that it is not easy to describe them.
But what with ducks, and what with pike, and what with sticklebacks, and what with water-beetles, and what with naughty boys, they are "sae sair hadden doun," as the Scotsmen say, that it is a wonder how they live; and some folks can't help hoping, with good Bishop Butler, that they may have another chance, to make things fair and even, somewhere, somewhen, somehow.
Big water-beetles with broken legs scurry over the small surface, clambering on the carp, and jumping over the frogs. The creatures have a strong hold on life. The frogs climb on the beetles, the newts on the frogs. The dark green tench, as more expensive fish, enjoy an exceptional position; they are kept in a special jar where they can't swim, but still they are not so cramped. . . .
Curiously enough, the same causes which produce this trance in slow-moving species, like those of Scarabseus for example, have a precisely contrary effect on species endowed with great activity. Rapacious beetles, when disturbed, scuttle quickly out of sight, and some water-beetles spin about the surface, in circles or zigzag lines, so rapidly as to confuse the eye.
Elsmere neither read nor reasoned. He spent his days in the school, in the village, pottering about the Mile End cottages, or the new Institute sometimes fishing, sometimes passing long summer hours on the commons with his club boys, hunting the ponds for caddises, newts, and water-beetles, peering into the furze-bushes for second broods, or watching the sand-martins in the gravel-pits, and trudging home at night in the midst of an escort of enthusiasts, all of them with pockets as full and miry as his own, to deposit the treasures of the day in the club-room.
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