“There isn’t any,” said Fisher.  “That’s the secret.”  After reflecting a moment, he added:  “Unless you call it a hole in the wall of the world.  Look here; I’ll tell you if you like, but I’m afraid it involves an introduction.  You’ve got to understand one of the tricks of the modern mind, a tendency that most people obey without noticing it.  In the village or suburb outside there’s an inn with the sign of St. George and the Dragon.  Now suppose I went about telling everybody that this was only a corruption of King George and the Dragoon.  Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry, from a vague feeling that it’s probable because it’s prosaic.  It turns something romantic and legendary into something recent and ordinary.  And that somehow makes it sound rational, though it is unsupported by reason.  Of course some people would have the sense to remember having seen St. George in old Italian pictures and French romances, but a good many wouldn’t think about it at all.  They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism.  Modern intelligence won’t accept anything on authority.  But it will accept anything without authority.  That’s exactly what has happened here.

“When some critic or other chose to say that Prior’s Park was not a priory, but was named after some quite modern man named Prior, nobody really tested the theory at all.  It never occurred to anybody repeating the story to ask if there was any Mr. Prior, if anybody had ever seen him or heard of him.  As a matter of fact, it was a priory, and shared the fate of most priories—­that is, the Tudor gentleman with the plumes simply stole it by brute force and turned it into his own private house; he did worse things, as you shall hear.  But the point here is that this is how the trick works, and the trick works in the same way in the other part of the tale.  The name of this district is printed Holinwall in all the best maps produced by the scholars; and they allude lightly, not without a smile, to the fact that it was pronounced Holiwell by the most ignorant and old-fashioned of the poor.  But it is spelled wrong and pronounced right.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked Crane, quickly, “that there really was a well?”

“There is a well,” said Fisher, “and the truth lies at the bottom of it.”

As he spoke he stretched out his hand and pointed toward the sheet of water in front of him.

“The well is under that water somewhere,” he said, “and this is not the first tragedy connected with it.  The founder of this house did something which his fellow ruffians very seldom did; something that had to be hushed up even in the anarchy of the pillage of the monasteries.  The well was connected with the miracles of some saint, and the last prior that guarded it was something like a saint himself; certainly he was something very like a martyr.  He defied the new owner and dared him to pollute the place, till the noble, in a fury, stabbed him and flung his body into the well, whither, after four hundred years, it has been followed by an heir of the usurper, clad in the same purple and walking the world with the same pride.”