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Updated: June 24, 2025
The sedge fringe in the shallows, the "haunt of coot and tern" elsewhere, and of hosts of moorhens and dabchicks on the now protected river, is mainly composed of the giant rush, smooth and round, which the water-rats cut down and peel to eat the pith. These great rushes, sometimes ten feet high, die every year like the sickliest flowers, and break and are washed away.
Her way took her along the banks of the Broadwater, and during one of the frequent pauses, necessitated by the investigations into the private affairs of water-rats and others, made by her companions, she and Peter Callaghan had exchanged greetings. He and Christian had fallen into talk, with the absence of formality that is, perhaps, peculiar to intercourse between his class and hers.
We picked up the hat and the scull in one of the little muddy bays of our brown river, forming an amphitheatre for water-rats and draped with great dockleaves, nettle-flowers, ragged robins, and other weeds for which the learned young lady gave the botanical names. It was pleasant to hear her speak with the full authority of absolute knowledge of her subject. She has intelligence.
And the mill with its booming; the great chestnut-tree under which they played at houses; their own little river, the Ripple, where the banks seemed like home, and Tom was always seeing the water-rats, while Maggie gathered the purple plumy tops of the reeds, which she forgot and dropped afterward; above all, the great Floss, along which they wandered with a sense of travel, to see the rushing spring-tide, the awful Eagle, come up like a hungry monster, or to see the Great Ash which had once wailed and groaned like a man, these things would always be just the same to them.
We held these trenches for fourteen days against the enemy's attacks. The gap was nine feet deep at this corner, and the black hole on the left faintly showing a fireplace was our kitchen, scarred by bullet marks made by snipers. The place was infested with rats. Great water-rats were continually getting at our food and cheese in the dug-outs.
We might as well go home to luncheon." As we buttoned up our coats and started back across the marsh, Jip ran ahead pretending he was looking for water-rats. "He knows something all right," whispered the Doctor. "And I think he knows what has happened too. It's funny, his not wanting to tell me. He has never done that before not in eleven years.
"I'm glad Josephine was thoughtful enough to come in ahead of us, Jean," he chuckled. "We look like a couple of drowned water-rats!" "I will bring up your sack, M'sieur," responded Jean. "If you haven't dry clothes of your own you will find garments behind the curtains. I think some of them will fit you. After we are warmed and dried we will have supper."
It's not at all a river to be proud of, except in the way of eels and water-rats." "Is there nothing to be proud of at Beamingham?" "There's the church tower; that's all." "A church tower is something; but I meant as to Beamingham Hall." "That word Hall misleads people," said Ralph.
The unsullied beauty and solitariness of this spot made me wish at first that I was a boy once more, to climb and to swim, to revel in the sunshine and flowers, to be nearer in spirit to the birds and dragon flies and water-rats; then, that I could build a cabin and live there all the summer long, forgetful of the world and its affairs, with no human creature to keep me company, and no book to read, or with only one slim volume, some Spanish poet, let me say Melendez, for preference only a small selection from his too voluminous writings; for he, albeit an eighteenth-century singer, was perhaps the last of that long, illustrious line of poets who sang as no others have sung of the pure delight-fulness of a life with nature.
At their footsteps the water-rats scuttled down into the water with tiny splashes; a dog barked somewhere a long way off; a train whistled; a frog croaked. From the stubbles and second crops of sun-baked clover puffs of warm air kept stealing up into the chillier air beneath the willows. Such moonlit nights never seem to sleep.
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