hough they were hidden. On each side moreover of the stream of this
river was a wide space of stones, great and little, and in most places
above this stony waste were banks of a few feet high, showing where the
yearly winter flood was most commonly stayed.

You must know that this great clearing in the woodland was not a matter
of haphazard; though the river had driven a road whereby men might fare
on each side of its hurrying stream. It was men who had made that Isle
in the woodland.

For many generations the folk that now dwelt there had learned the craft
of iron-founding, so that they had no lack of wares of iron and steel,
whether they were tools of handicraft or weapons for hunting and for war.
It was the men of the Folk, who coming adown by the river-side had made
that clearing. The tale tells not whence they came, but belike from the
dales of the distant mountains, and from dales and mountains and plains
further aloof and yet further.

Anyhow they came adown the river; on its waters on rafts, by its shores
in wains or bestriding their horses or their kine, or afoot, till they
had a mind to abide; and there as it fell they stayed their travel, and
spread from each side of the river, and fought with the wood and its wild
things, that they might make to themselves a dwelling-place on the face
of the earth.

So they cut down the trees, and burned their stumps that the grass might
grow sweet for their kine and sheep and horses; and they diked the river
where need was all through the plain, and far up into the wild-wood to
bridle the winter floods: and they made them boats to ferry them over,
and to float down stream and track up-stream: they fished the river's
eddies also with net and with line; and drew drift from out of it of far-
travelled wood and other matters; and the gravel of its shallows they
washed for gold; and it became their friend, and they loved it, and gave
it a name, and called it the Dusky, and the Glassy, and the
Mirkwood-water; for the names of it changed with the generations of man.

There then in the clearing of the wood that for many years grew greater
yearly they drave their beasts to pasture in the new-made meadows, where
year by year the grass grew sweeter as the sun shone on it and the
standing waters went from it; and now in the year whereof the tale
telleth it was a fair and smiling plain, and no folk might have a better
meadow.

But long before that had they learned the craft of