THE SURREY PONDS 93 



dam at the lower end is built of crumbling, sandy 

 loam, laced and bound together by the roots of oaks. 

 The low November sun looks over the steep bank 

 and beats into the sheltered coomb with a warmth 

 that can be felt, though the opposite bank lies cold 

 in deep shadow, with streaks of hoar-frost lingering 

 beneath the birches. In front, the slender sparkling 

 stream, so shallow that it must needs divide to run 

 round tiny islands of gravel and jungles of cresses, 

 meets again, and slips smoothly under a foot-wide 

 plank, through the loam-bank, and into the pool 

 below. 



The keeper, tempted to linger and chat by the 

 warmth and beauty of the day, explained the new and 

 sensible trout-culture which now stocks the pools with 

 thousands of dainty fish, in place of the chance supply 

 of coarse jack and odious wriggling eels which were 

 once their main inhabitants. In the warm days of 

 spring, thousands of troutlets, about one-and-a-half 

 inches long, bright, silvery little fish, with scarlet spots 

 upon their sides, are caught in the narrow runnels of 

 the water-meadows between the ponds, and placed in 

 a long wooden cistern, through which a constant stream 

 flows. The water is then drawn off from the pool 

 below the keeper 's cottage, and all the larger trout are 

 removed to the other ponds in the chain. The sluice 

 is closed, the pool fills, and the young fish are let loose, 

 secured against all attack except the nightly visits of 

 marauding herons from Stag's Wood, in Wolmer 

 Forest. In eighteen months the water is once more 



