This night a red sedge and I were in the meadow below Crab Hatch from 9.0 to 10.0, and later. I saw nothing move, caught nothing, cared nothing. The evening was a benediction, dry, warm, still; not a hint of mist anywhere, not a flaw on the mirror of the stream. The sky was a field of cloud picked out in smoky violet with fish scales of darkest brown, but there flared above the valley's elbow one broad band of white light. As I crept along the bank it glinted ghostly among the mysterious fields. And always, dying, it moved steadily into the North. Under the banks lurked endless gloom, and at my feet the thinnest rippling shallow, at this unrevealing hour, seemed motionless, as if the stillness of the night had gripped the very river.
The Valley, by day so bright, so filled with colour and life and feature—the spread carpet of tinted grasses, the swelling golden green walls of turf, the arched canopy of flecked blue, the sombre beech woods, the grey tremulous willows,
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