When our few preparations were completed, we hastened, by a shorter than the customary route, through fields and pastures, and across a portion of the meadow, to the particular spot on the river-bank which I had paused to contemplate in the course of my afternoon’s ramble.  A nameless presentiment had again drawn me thither, after leaving Eliot’s pulpit.  I showed my companions where I had found the handkerchief, and pointed to two or three footsteps, impressed into the clayey margin, and tending towards the water.  Beneath its shallow verge, among the water-weeds, there were further traces, as yet unobliterated by the sluggish current, which was there almost at a standstill.  Silas Foster thrust his face down close to these footsteps, and picked up a shoe that had escaped my observation, being half imbedded in the mud.

“There’s a kid shoe that never was made on a Yankee last,” observed he.  “I know enough of shoemaker’s craft to tell that.  French manufacture; and see what a high instep! and how evenly she trod in it!  There never was a woman that stept handsomer in her shoes than Zenobia did.  Here,” he added, addressing Hollingsworth, “would you like to keep the shoe?”

Hollingsworth started back.

“Give it to me, Foster,” said I.

I dabbled it in the water, to rinse off the mud, and have kept it ever since.  Not far from this spot lay an old, leaky punt, drawn up on the oozy river-side, and generally half full of water.  It served the angler to go in quest of pickerel, or the sportsman to pick up his wild ducks.  Setting this crazy bark afloat, I seated myself in the stern with the paddle, while Hollingsworth sat in the bows with the hooked pole, and Silas Foster amidships with a hay-rake.

“It puts me in mind of my young days,” remarked Silas, “when I used to steal out of bed to go bobbing for hornpouts and eels.  Heigh-ho!—­ well, life and death together make sad work for us all!  Then I was a boy, bobbing for fish; and now I am getting to be an old fellow, and here I be, groping for a dead body!  I tell you what, lads; if I thought anything had really happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind o’ sorrowful.”

“I wish, at least, you would hold your tongue,” muttered I.

The moon, that night, though past the full, was still large and oval, and having risen between eight and nine o’clock, now shone aslantwise over the river, throwing the high, opposite bank, with its woods, into deep shadow, but lighting up the hither shore pretty effectually.  Not a ray appeared to fall on the river itself.  It lapsed imperceptibly away, a broad, black, inscrutable depth, keeping its own secrets from the eye of man, as impenetrably as mid-ocean could.

“Well, Miles Coverdale,” said Foster, “you are the helmsman.  How do you mean to manage this business?”

“I shall let the boat drift, broadside foremost, past that stump,” I replied.  “I know the bottom, having sounded it in fishing.  The shore, on this side, after the first step or two, goes off very abruptly; and there is a pool, just by the stump, twelve or fifteen feet deep.  The current could not have force enough to sweep any sunken object, even if partially buoyant, out of that hollow.”