ONCE SILVER STREAMS. 97 
at his transgression by helping to turn the river 
into a vast open sewer? So long as the “Authority” 
pours filthy excrement into the river, the local 
manufacturer has them on the hip, and is safe. 
This Sanitary Authority for the most part con- 
sists of magistrates and manufacturers; of men 
whose interests are so identical that they tacitly 
agree that the townsfolk may play the part of 
the shuttlecock to their battledores. And all 
this in spite of the fact that these same towns- 
folk have paid, by their hardly-got earnings, a 
hundred thousand pounds for the carrying out 
of a main-sewage scheme, in order that the purity 
of the river might be for ever retained. 
Then there are those thousand objects of the 
river-side, which have such a healthful influence 
upon the inhabitants. Many of the trees stand 
starkly outlined against the sky, with great black 
skeleton limbs, the hoisted ‘black flags” of Nature, 
proclaiming each that a life has been sacrificed 
—to pollution. The birds and flowers have gone, 
and we have in their place a vast line of inky 
desolation, unrelieved by colour or life. What 
impresses one most is the desolation, and silence, 
and bare coldness that seem to have taken 
possession of the lifeless stream. Where are 
the moorhens that rustled among the reeds; the 
kingfisher in green and gold; the white-breasted 
H 
