as I
approached the river.

Following the slippery path as far as it led down the dell, I
stopped at the brink of a pool about a dozen yards, apparently,
from the bottom, and looked up at the water. Bursting like a vast
belt of molten silver out of an eerie wilderness of rocks and trees,
the stream, as it tumbled down between high walls of cliff to the
platform of projecting rocks around the pool at the edge of which I
stood, divided into three torrents, which themselves were again
divided and scattered by projecting boulders into cascades before
they fell into the gulf below. The whole seemed one wide cataract of
living moonlight that made the eyes ache with beauty.

Amid the din of the water I listened for the wail which had so deeply
impressed Winifred, and certainly there was what may be described as
a sound within a sound, which ears so attuned to every note of
Superstition's gamut as Winifred's might easily accept as the wail of
Sir John Wynn's ghost.

There was no footpath down to the bottom, but I descended without any
great difficulty, though I was now soaked in spray. Here the
mysterious human sound seemed to be less perceptible amid the din of
the torrent than from the platform where I had stayed to listen to
it. But when I climbed up again to the spot by the mid-pool where I
had originally stood, a strange sensation came to me. My recollection
of Winnie's words on the night of the landslip came upon me with such
overmastering power that the noise of the cataract seemed changed to
the sound of billows tumbling on Raxton sands, and the 'wail' of Sir
John Wynn seemed changed to that shriek from Raxton cliff which
appalled Winnie as it appalled me.

The following night I passed into a moonlight as bright as that which
had played me such fantastic tricks at the Swallow Falls.

It was not until I had crossed the bridge over the Conway, and was
turning to the right in the direction of Fairy Glen, that I fully
realised how romantic the moonlight was. Every wooded hill and every
precipice, whether craggy and bald or feathered with pines, was
bathed in light that would have made an Irish bog, or an Essex marsh,
or an Isle of Ely fen, a land of poetry.

When I reached Pont Llyn-yr-Afange (Beaver Pool Bridge) I lingered to
look down the lovely lane on the left, through which I was to pass in
order to reach the rocky dell of Fairy Glen, for it was perfumed, not
with the breath of the flowers now asleep, but wi