zi6 SEPTEMBER 



forced to grip yet harder to prevent the rod slipping 

 round in my hands. You could see the fibres within the 

 twigs twisting on themselves, a necessary adaptation 

 where the top moved and the portion in the hand was 

 kept still. It is a curious feeling when first experienced. 

 The rod is irresistible, uncontrollable. Its point insists 

 upon rising, or in some cases dipping, and the firmer the 

 resistance of the hands the more compulsive the activity 

 of the free end of the stick. The query still sticks in my 

 mind : does not the spring created by the nature of the 

 grip and the bending of the two elastic arms of the rods 

 set in motion a force that is purely mechanical ? Such a 

 spring must produce motion, as soon as the stick is 

 moved in the least out of the horizontal. Learned 

 mechanics should be able to resolve this doubt authorita 

 tively ; and will they please do it ? But for the time let 

 that be : the interest in this well on this day of drought 

 had nothing to do with scepticism or mysticism, with the 

 rival claims of obviously mechanical or subtly electrical 

 force. What we thought of was water. 



Every animal, every plant was thinking of water (if the 

 verb is permissible). The partridges gathered to the 

 garden pond. The wasps, scarcely discoverable else 

 where, collected in numbers to a little stretch of gutter 

 that the overflow moistened. The bird-bath was en 

 circled with bees. The rats reeled in their gait as they 

 came out of their hedgerow holes to seek in vain for any 

 moist and succulent food. The worms were a yard and 

 a half underground, and the sugar-beet and lucerne were 

 lower still, travelling with the subtle intelligence of their 

 kind (the right phrase, I believe, is the tropistic compul 

 sion of their structure) to the layer where moisture is still 

 held. We, the well-borers, with the help of the divining- 

 rod, geological maps, and practical experience of the 



