Fierce as the rain was, it could not raise the leaden waters of that fearful pool, defended as they were by the steep banks of dripping yellow clay, striped horribly here and there with ghastly uncertain green and blue.

They said no man could fathom it; and yet all round the edges of it grew a rank crop of dreary reeds and segs, some round, some flat, but none ever flowering as other things flowered, never dying and being renewed, but always the same stiff array of unbroken reeds and segs, some round, some flat.  Hard by me were two trees leafless and ugly, made, it seemed, only for the wind to go through with a wild sough on such nights as these; and for a mile from that place were no other trees.

True, I could not see all this at that time, then, in the dark night, but I knew well that it was all there; for much had I studied this pool in the day-time, trying to learn the secret of it; many hours I had spent there, happy with a kind of happiness, because forgetful of the past.  And even now, could I not hear the wind going through those trees, as it never went through any trees before or since? could I not see gleams of the dismal moor? could I not hear those reeds just taken by the wind, knocking against each other, the flat ones scraping all along the round ones?  Could I not hear, moreover, the slow trickling of the land-springs through the clay banks?

The cold, chill horror of the place was too much for me; I had never been there by night before, nobody had for quite a long time, and now to come on such a night!  If there had been any moon, the place would have looked more as it did by day; besides, the moon shining on water is always so beautiful, on any water even:  if it had been starlight, one could have looked at the stars and thought of the time when those fields were fertile and beautiful (for such a time was, I am sure), when the cowslips grew among the grass, and when there was promise of yellow-waving corn stained with poppies; that time which the stars had seen, but which we had never seen, which even they would never see again—­past time!

Ah! what was that which touched my shoulder?—­Yes, I see, only a dead leaf.—­Yes, to be here on this eighth of May too of all nights in the year, the night of that awful day when ten years ago I slew him, not undeservedly, God knows, yet how dreadful it was!—­Another leaf! and another!—­Strange, those trees have been dead this hundred years, I should think.  How sharp the wind is too, just as if I were moving along and meeting it;—­why, I am moving! what then, I am not there after all; where am I then? there are the trees; no, they are freshly-planted oak saplings, the very ones that those withered last-year’s leaves were blown on me from.

I have been dreaming then, and am on my road to the lake:  but what a young wood!  I must have lost my way; I never saw all this before.  Well—­I will walk on stoutly.

May the Lord help my senses!  I am riding!—­on a mule; a bell tinkles somewhere on him; the wind blows something about with a flapping sound:  something? in heaven’s name, what? My long black robes.—­Why—­when I left my house I was clad in serviceable broadcloth of the nineteenth century.