A man sat fishing in a punt just where the river broadened into a backwater edged with willow trees. At times he threw out ground-bait, and at times raised a stone bottle to his lips, keeping one eye the while watchfully turned upon his float. School children strayed along the road, as rosy and as flaxen-haired as those that Gregory the Great thought fitting to be angels, though they had never been baptized. Now and again the farmer stepped into his field to watch the harvesting, and cast an eye of pride and of affection on his horses, and then, coming back to the gate, he drew the paper from his pocket and read its columns, much in the way an Arab reads a letter, murmuring the words aloud until their meaning penetrated to his brain. Chewing a straw, and slowly rubbing off the grains of an ear of wheat into his hand, he gazed over his fields as if he feared to see in them some of the horrors that he read. Again he muttered, with a puzzled air, “’Orrible! ’undreds of men and ’orses lying in the corn. It seems a sad thing to believe, doesn’t it now?” he said; and as he spoke soldiers on motorcycles hurtled down the road, leaving a trail of dust that perhaps looked like smoke to him after his reading in the _Daily Mail_. “They tell me,” he remarked, after a vigorous application of his blue handkerchief to his streaming face, “that these ’ere motorcycles ’ave a gun fastened to them, over there in Belgium, where they are a-goin’ on at it in such a way. The paper says, ‘Ranks upon ranks of ’em is just mowed down like wheat.’ . . . ’Orrid, I call it, if it’s true, for now and then I think those chaps only puts that kind of thing into their papers to ’ave a sale for them.” He looked about him as if, like Pilate, he was looking for an elusive truth not to be found on earth, and then walked down the road till he came to the backwater where the man was fishing in his punt. They looked at one another over a yard or two of muddy water, and asked for news about the war, in the way that people do from others who they must know are quite as ignorant as they are themselves. The fisherman “’ad given up readin’ the war noos; it’s all a pack of lies,” and pointing to the water, said in a cautious voice, “Some people says they ’ears. I ain’t so sure about it; but, anyhow, it’s always best to be on the safe side.” Then he addressed himself once more to the business of the day, and in the contemplation of his float no doubt became as much absorbed into the universal principle of nature as is an Indian sitting continually with his eyes turned on his diaphragm. Men passing down the road, each with a paper in his hand, looked up and threw the farmer scraps of news, uncensored and spiced high with details which had never happened, so that in after years their children will most likely treasure as facts, which they have received from long-lost parents, the wildest fairy tales.