Six herons stood in a row eighty yards above the bridge, in the sandy shallow at the head of the pool. _Kack! Kack! Kack! Kack!_--the young birds squawked with eagerness and delight. Dusk deepened over the wide and empty river, the pool shone faintly with the sky. Down by the round black piers of the bridge something splashed. Old Nog raised his head, for he had been awaiting the splash. It was a sign that the bass in the pool were beginning to feed. Splash, splatter, splash. Soon many fish were rising to take the shrimp-fry on the surface. They were hungry after the daytime rest, having gone up with the tide to Halfpenny Bridge, and returned to the pool without feeding, while men on the banks fished with lines of rag-worm baited hooks. Usually the men went home to supper, with empty baskets, before the fishes' feeding time. Then to the quiet pool came that wise fisher, Old Nog, with his family, standing motionless while the bass swam into the shallow water;--splash, splatter, splash, as they turned on their gleaming sides to take the shrimp-fry. Old Nog peered, with beak held low, and snicked--_Kack! Kack! Kack! Kack!_ cried the four small herons, beating vanes and falling over long toes in their eagerness to gulp the silvery fish. _Gark!_ said Old Nog, swallowing the bass, and thrusting his beak and long feathered neck at the four. _Gark!_ They got out of his way; never before had he spoken so severely to them. One saw the flicker of a fish in the water, and stepped towards it; the bass saw the enemy, and sped into deeper water. _Rark!_ said Old Nog, sharply, and they stood still. Sucking noises arose out of the pool as it grew darker. These were the feeding noises of male eels, thin and small and mud-coloured, whom the larger blue females would meet in the autumnal migration. In wriggling rushes the eels sought the shrimp-fry in the shallows, and whenever one passed near a beak--_dap!_ it was snicked, lifted from the water as a writhing knot, and swallowed. The Railway Bridge loomed low and black against the glimmer of sky and water. Splash, splatter, the bass were moving about the pool. Two or three lay, troutwise, in the slight downward current by each round iron pier, watching the surface above them for the dark moving speck of a shrimp. The splashes of their jumps echoed under the girders. A summer sandpiper flew over the bridge, crying in the darkness, for it had been alarmed while feeding under the glidders of the empty pill. It was answered by a curlew on the gravel bank above the herons.