STREAM AND DITCH

"You can have more fun with a running stream than with a pond," says the Imp. And that is because the galloping water, that leaps and runs over the pebbles, seems to do things to you all the time, while the water in a pond just stays still and lets you do things to it. A thousand games can be played with moving water; at every game it is as fresh as if no one had played with it before.

The Imp spends some of his jolliest mornings at the side of the beck, that flows down from the moorland, through a little wood not far from the house. Up on the moor it is a tiny stream, except when the big rains come, and then it is a streak of foaming white in the mist on the hillside. But, when it has left the heather and bracken and drops through the wood, it is like a little swift flowing river, with shelving rocky sides, and boulders in mid stream, and tiny waterfalls and pools and weirs. Below the wood it flows out through the meadowland of the valley, growing wider, and moving slower as it goes. Often as the Imp has been playing with the leaping water, and I have been sitting near by among the shadowy leaves of the trees, hazels and rowans, that swing over its channel, I have heard him sing over to himself the words of a poem which he knows. It is all about a stream.

"I come from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
and sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.

"I chatter over stony ways
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

"I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling."

This is not all the song, but only his favourite verses.

The Imp builds stone on stone across the stream, and makes a bridge with a dozen piers, and flat stones laid across. Or he sets a row of big stones in the stream, so that the water gushes between them. Then he piles little stones against them, and fills the joints with moss and earth until he makes a solid dam, so that the stream rises up and up, deeper and deeper, unable to go any farther, until at last it overflows the top of the dam and, rushing down, pulls everything to pieces beneath it. That is really exciting. It is exciting, too, to make little canoes of folded paper, and put a pebble in for ballast, and let them shoot the rapid, as if there were Red Indians inside, skilfully guiding with carved and painted paddles. These are only a few of the running water games.

In a little hollow of the stream, below the waterfalls, where the falling water has churned out a basin for itself, we sometimes see a trout, silvery bellied, and dark of back, with spots along his sides. But the place where we go to look for fish and other water folk is farther down the stream, below the wood and moorland. The beck is tamer down there, and has given up leaping from ledge to ledge, but flows quietly and smoothly, with a rippling song of its own, over a broad pebbly channel between the green meadows.

Footpaths cross the meadows, and where they come to the brook, bridges have been made by simply laying a huge flat slate stone from bank to bank across the water. One of our favourite ways of picnicking is to take our basket of food across the meadows and camp in the long grass close by one of these bridges. For then we get the best of everything. The best of the meadow things, purple orchids, and kingcups, like enormous buttercups twice gilded, and the delicate butterfly orchids, who are rare indeed, with their pale green spikes, with the white flowers tinted with green, fluttering round them. There is plenty of the little blue forget-me-not growing in clumps close to the water, and ragged robin, with his touzled pink petals close under the meadow hedge. And, best of all, perhaps we see a blue flash, and then another blue flash, and then another, and we know that there is a dragon fly shooting about over the water, and among the water plants, like a small azure comet. Sometimes, when he hovers over a flower, we can see him, but we can never see his wings. They move too fast. And when he is flying about, we can see nothing but the blue glittering flash that shows that he is there.

The best of the water things, too, we get. For lying on the banks of the stream, even while we are eating our sandwiches, we can see the caddises in the muddy shallows, and sometimes a water shrimp, and often a shoal of minnows. And, when the stream is low, the Imp can crawl along, from one side of the bridge to the other, under the big slate, putting his feet and hands on the stones left dry by the water. And that is fun indeed. The Elf and I lie flat on our fronts on the stone bridge, and hang our heads over the edge, and look backwards up the tunnel. And we see the Imp start in at the other end, and come crawling under like a rat in a wet hole. We see his hands and feet clawing about for stones to rest on, and the Elf shouts to him, "There is a stone there—no, there—there, stupid!" and sometimes he finds the stone, and sometimes he does not. We hear him grunt with hotness and excitement. And usually we hear him splash, as one leg or the other slips from its resting-place into the water. And then out he comes, mightily panting, at our end of the bridge. Somehow, with a great pull, he tumbles round on to the bank. And then, because one foot is wet he must take his shoe and stocking off. And if one shoe, why not the other? And if the Imp is allowed to take his shoes and stockings off, why not the Elf? And so, in about three minutes, there are two pairs of stockings and two pair of shoes neatly laid out on the bank, and two small people paddling in the stream, playing for a little, just for the joy of feeling the water stream past their ankles, and then searching about and looking for the little folk of the stream and talking about them, and asking all sorts of questions.

The first and easiest of all the small water folk for people like the Imp and the Elf to find are the caddisworms. Do you know a stonefly when you see one? A long brown-winged dirty-looking fly; you must often have seen one skimming along a brook, and settling on the pebbles that the water has left partly dry. A caddisworm is the thing that is some day going to be a stonefly, just as caterpillars are one day going to be butterflies or moths, and just as Imps and Elves are some day going to be grown-ups. That is all very well. But it does not tell you what a caddisworm is like. This is how the children find one. They paddle to a shallow part of the stream, where it flows under grassy banks, a place where the bottom is a little muddy, instead of being covered with small round pebbles. Then they stand and look into the water, up stream, for the ripples flowing from their ankles make it impossible to see into the water clearly if they look the other way. Then, searching carefully over the bottom, they look for anything small that moves. Presently they see something. It may be a little bundle of tiny sticks, or some pieces of dead grass, or a couple of irregularly shaped twigs, moving crookedly over the sand or mud. And they know that they have found a caddisworm. One or other of them, usually the Imp, dives a hand down into the water and catches it, which is very easy to do, for caddisworms are leisurely people, and do not move much faster than snails. It is lifted out of the water and held out, looking like a little bundle of sticks in the palm of his paw. But while we watch something comes jerkily out of the end of the bundle—a black head and six busy legs, and soon the caddis is crawling along as fast as it can, dragging its house behind it. For the bundle of sticks is really a log house that the caddis has built for itself. He builds it about his own body all round him, adding stick by stick in the neatest, cleverest manner. He builds with anything he can find, and it is often possible to make him a present of a twig, and see him use it up as a new log in the walls of his house. Nothing comes amiss to him. If the stream he lives in is full of little snails, he is quite ready to cover his home with their shells. Beads, twigs, pieces of grass cut short, flat seeds, scraps of paper, anything you can think of, he will somehow manage to make useful. The odd part of it is that instead of bringing the bricks to his house, or the logs, or whatever you like to call them, he goes in his house to look for each brick, and, when he has finished his building, he carries his home about with him.

As the Imp puts the caddis back into the water he sometimes sees a sudden stirring of the mud, as if someone had poked a pencil in and pulled it quickly out again, bringing a puff of fine sediment up into the water. In the place from which the puff came is a water-shrimp, who is far harder to catch than the caddis, for he is one of the nimblest of the little dodging water-folk. It takes the Imp ten minutes and a lot of splashing before, if he is lucky, he can catch one in the hollow of his hand. Then it lies in a little puddle of water in his palm, whirling itself about, and thrashing into ripples the waters of its prison. It is very like a seaside shrimp, only smaller. It is pale, muddy brown, and looks as if it had been made of tiny napkin rings slipped over each other like a little curly telescope, with active legs and busy feelers.

Sometimes as the children paddle up the stream they see a brown cloud in the water, darting up and up before them in swift swimming jerks. "Minnows!" they shout, and "Minnows, Ogre, look!" and watch the shoal of little fishes flashing through the water just out of reach of them. From moment to moment one of them turns half over in the water, with a flash of silver as he turns. And sometimes, when the Imp and the Elf are not paddling, and we are all three of us lying on the bank, we see the shoal swim slowly past us, and watch the minnows fling themselves right out of the water after the tiny flies that play over the surface of the stream. Then it is as if a clever juggler were hidden under the water and were throwing little curved knives up from the bottom of the stream to twist and sparkle in the air, and then fall plosh, plosh, into widening circles of ripples. Minnow after minnow leaps out of the water, turns and falls, and the ripples of the different splashes cross one another and cut the water into a thousand thousand glittering points of light.

Sometimes we hear a bigger splash than is made by a minnow, and looking up the stream we see something swimming strongly through the water, a double trail of ripples flowing out on either side of him. Just the nose of him is above water, and sometimes he goes under altogether. The thing swims to a flat stone in the middle of the stream that makes a kind of island, and suddenly we see it fling itself up out of the water and sit on its hindlegs on the stone, briskly washing its nose with its fore-paws. "Water-rat," whispers the Imp to the Elf, and we do not move so much as a hair, any of us. The brown, blunt-nosed rat sits up on the stone and pulls its paws over its head and throws them back again, like the neat-minded gentleman he is, Presently he thinks he hears a noise, an ominous something, and the paws are suddenly still for a moment, and the round head cocked on one side. His head is so blunt and so near his body that one would scarcely think he had a neck at all if he were not able to look this way and that way and this way again, in the smallest part of second. Ah, he sees us. For another instant he stays dead still, wondering perhaps if we have seen him, and then off he shoots again into the water, swimming now on the bottom of the stream and now once more driving his nose along the surface until suddenly he slips under the bank and we cannot see him at all. When we lean over the bank, just where he disappeared, we find a hole, which is the doorway of his home. Here he lives in the moist bank under the over-hanging ferns, close to the water which is as good as land to him. Here he lives and has a merry time to himself, doing nobody any harm, except the waterplants, from whom he takes his dinners.

A little farther down the stream a broad deep ditch crosses the meadows to join it. The ditch is deep, and the water in it moves so slowly that it is almost still. Weeds and grasses grow from the bottom of the stream, and are only just bent over by the current, and the moist edges of the ditch are full of sunken holes, where the cows have thrust their feet into the mud. The whole of the ground by the side of the ditch is rich with flowers, but so swampy that they are difficult to reach, except at a few places. But very often the Imp and the Elf, when their shoes and stockings are once off, make up their minds to despise mud, and wade through the grasses close to the edges of the ditch to look for sticklebacks. And really, when I think of sticklebacks, I agree with the children that it is worth more than muddy ankles to get a look at them. For the sticklebacks are very fine fellows indeed, the little soldiers of the water-people, tiny fishes, who carry spears set upright on their backs, spears that are strong and well pointed, too, as the Imp found when he took hold of a stickle between his finger and thumb.

The sticklebacks are like the newts of the duck-pond in quite a number of ways. Not to look at, of course, for one has legs while the other has fins; but in several of their habits. In the love-making times, when the he-newts show their gorgeous coats, the stickleback lords put on a brilliant uniform of glittering green and scarlet and gold. Like the he-newts, they battle between themselves, and more than once we have watched a noble skirmish in the deep water under a tussock of grass. We have seen the stickleback lords dash at each other again and again, trying to rip each other up with their sharp spears, and, at the last, we have seen the conqueror sailing proudly away, even more gorgeous than before.

The Imp loves the sticklebacks because they are so bold and jolly and move so quickly and so jerkily that it is hard to follow them. But the Elf loves them for quite another reason. She loves them because they are homely. Most of the water people, like the frogs and newts, take no bother at all about their eggs, but just leave them to themselves without ever caring whether they hatch or no. But the stickleback is as careful as a blackbird, and builds a little nest for the eggs down among the weeds on the bottom of the ditch, and stays there watching and guarding till they hatch out into little stickles. That is why the Elf loves sticklebacks. They do look after their children a little.

Later in the year we see the shoals of little sticklebacks, not so big as pen-nibs, who have left their nests in the ditch, and are swimming away to see the world for themselves. Often we lie on the bank and tell each other stories about them. And all these stories begin: "Once upon a time there was a little stickleback, one of a shoal," and all the stories end: "So the little stickleback drove his enemy away in a fright, and swam back to his nest glowing with colour and pride." For, of course, by the time the story is finished the little stickleback has grown into a big stickleback and has a nest of his own.

Besides the sticklebacks and minnows there are a great many other fishes among the water-folk, but we do not meet them so often, and most of them live in bigger places than the stream or the ditch, or even the duck-pond. Sometimes, though, in the pebbly part of the stream we meet a loach, a little brown speckled fish with a flat head and little suckers like the horns of a snail sticking out all round his mouth. We see him slip along in the water under the shadowy side of a stone. If he does not come out at the other end we know he is resting there, and then if we can make the stone move without muddying the water, we may see him flit from his hiding place, zig-zag among the pebbles, looking for a new stone where he may shelter.

And then, too, when the stream flows nearer to the sea, which is only four miles from our house, you know, we find some other water people who are very pleasant indeed. The sea spreads inland in a broad pale sandy bay, with marshland grown over with sparse reedy grass, and covered with pools of salty water, and channels full of sandy mud. The stream flows out into this bay, and at some times of the year, when we walk up from the bay along its banks, we see stones that look as if they were heads, with a waving mass of black hair flowing from them down the current. When we look closer, we see that the black hair is a mass of tiny eels. Little black wriggling water snakes they look like, though they are nothing of the sort, and we sometimes remind each other of the tale of the Gorgon's Head, with all its snaky crop. Sometimes we have caught a little eel or two, and kept them in a big jar; but they are not such adaptable guests as the tadpoles, and we do not think we make them very comfortable. The Imp loves to watch them, and finds it hard to believe that these are eels, really eels, like the big twisting creatures he sees when he leans over the side of the boat, when we go rowing on the lake. You shall hear about those eels in the next chapter.

But, do you know, I believe our dearest of all the water people, are not really water things at all, but birds? There are two of them, that belong to the stream, and I expect I shall be scolded by the Imp and the Elf for putting them at the end of the chapter. I shall have to explain that I meant it as an honour to them. They are birds; and one of them lives up the stream, where it is a wild little beck, falling from rock to rock in the wood on the moorland side, and the other hops from stone to stone in the shallows of the brook, where it flows more peacefully through the flat green meadows. The one is the dipper, and the other is the water wagtail.

The dipper is a little brown fellow, with a white front and throat, and a jovial little shout of his own. Very often, as we climb up through the wood, with the noise of the thousand tiny waterfalls swishing in our ears, we meet the dipper, perched on a stone by the side of one of the pools, looking as if he were making a careful map inside his head of everything he can see at the bottom of the water. As soon as he notices us, there is a brown flash in the air, and he is up, and over the next fall, and perched on a stone by the pool above. When we have climbed painfully up over the slippery rocks and the soft green earth with the help of hands and knees, and little trees, and clumps of heather, we find him sitting there, as gay and fresh as ever, and perfectly ready to dart up stream again. But sometimes we have been able to watch him, and see him dive into the pool; for he can swim under water as if he were fish and not a bird at all. He can swim round and round the bottom of the pools as easily as he can fly. The Imp thinks him a very fortunate person; for he can do everything. He can swim under water, he can hop about on land, and he can fly in the air. And when you can do all those three things, there is not much else left to want, is there?

The other bird is as dainty and spruce a little fellow as you can imagine. All dark and white he is, looking like a pale and tiny magpie, with a long tail. His tail gave him his name, and I have been told a story about that. Here it is:—Once upon a time there was an old wise man, and he set himself to write a huge book about all the birds that ever are. So he went out with a lot of pens and ink and paper, and lived in a hut at the edge of the meadows, just sheltered by a wood. He told all the birds he knew what he was about, and they told all the others. So that they all came—albatrosses, and sparrows, and thrushes, and penguins, and blackbirds, and guillemots, and seagulls, and flamingoes, and peewits, and ostriches, and kingfishers—and fluttered and chattered in a huge crowd in the meadows by the hut. One by one they perched on a log in front of the old man, and he wrote down what they were like, and what were their names, and all about them. And this all worked very well until he came to the wagtail, when he could not think of a name for it. He put his head on one side and looked at the little mottled bird, and he said, "Well, my life, I do not know what to call you," and the little bird wagged its tail. The old man scratched his head, and said, "Well, you little speckled thing, what am I to call you?" and the little bird wagged its tail. The old man grunted and groaned, and made all the noises we all make when we are stuck over a very simple thing. He could not think of what to write, and he kept dipping his pen in the ink, and scratching his head with the other end of the penholder; and all the time the little bird wagged its tail. Its wagging muddled the old man worse than before, and he said angrily, "You do nothing but wag your tail, wag your tail, wag—your—tail" and suddenly he found that he had written down wagtail without thinking. And the little bird has been called a wagtail ever since.

"And it does wag its tail all the time," says the Elf. It really does. We see it flit about the shores of the stream, first a little this way, and then a little that, and every time it perches its tail wags up and down, up and down, like a tiny see-saw that has lost its other end.

Sometimes late in the summer we see yellow wagtails by the stream, and they are even prettier than the grey ones, the very daintiest of little fairy birds. But in autumn, both the grey wagtails and the yellow ones fly away over seas like the swallows, and we do not meet them by the stream side till next year.